Looking Death in the Eyes at New Wave on Friday

A cowboy in black walks into a café.

Like that joke, this story has no punchline.

This man in black walks into my café. He’s an older man, but you wouldn’t call him an “older gentleman” yet. Could be 50. Could be 60. Could be aging fast. Could be aging well. He’s wearing the black cowboy boots, the black cloak and a black cowboy hat with its devilish black curves. His boots don’t have any spurs, but the toes come to a silver tip. And as I notice them, I notice also that he walks with a enigmatic limp that sort of drags his right foot behind him as if dead. In pain, he scowls ever so slightly under the brim of his hat, behind his silver barrel of a mustache, over thin silver knife of hair that runs from his lips to his chin.

He is going to be the villain of this piece, I think. If this were an old west saloon, the room would choke-off silent as the cowboy in black drags on in. He would order his drink and the bartender would stammer his assent: whiskey—no brand, no directions, no quantity. The barkeep would say “right away” and call him “Mr. ____”

The cowboy in black takes a seat at a table for two against a brick wall across the room. He doesn’t take off his coat or hat. He digs his hands throughout his coat—I can’t make inside from outside in that obsidian mass—and holds it low in hard, white hands, each added weight by bulging silver rings.

He looks up. His red eyes look right at me.

If this were an old west saloon, this would be it. I’d be a fucking dead man. And every man in here would know it.

He’d be my huckleberry. He’d throw a gun at my feet and tell me to pick it up. He’d shoot me dead the moment I bent for the handle. He’d tell me I am no daisy. He’d look around the room. He’d tell the room:

“You all saw him. He had a gun.”

And I would die the western death of the unwise.

He looks back to his phone and in a minute is joined by, improbably, a wraith-thin Asian woman in a native American tribal sweater. She is young and seems happy—not particularly elated or animate, but buoyant for a Chicago girl come mid-December.

Hey, the saloon breathes a sigh of relief. Go on and re-write the number on the chalkboard: "26 days without an 'accident.'" A round for whole bar! Charge it to that black fellow in the glasses, who doesn't know how lucky he is!





Currently listening to: “Wake” by the Antlers

Silent Date

A girl asked if I was using the other seat at my table and when I motioned "No" she sat down.That never happens to me. She was younger, thin, bronzed by Mediterranean generations, thin-faced but with open eyes with heavy lashes like black-silk palm branches and lips like red pool furniture. An interesting collection of parts that neither disappointed nor excited me.

we shared the table for two hours without contact
neither of us dropped anything for the other to pick up
neither of us sneezed to receive the other's blessing
neither of us peeked up at just the time to catch the other peeking back
a song came over the speakers haphazardly loud
and we both looked up, recriminating stares, to the barista until she turned it down
but we did not wink to each other to share in the job well done
we did not voice a recognition that we made a good team

It was a safe, silent date, complete with invisible flowers and zero promises we couldn't keep. Give me a billion dollars and I will make the one safe space on Earth

a white room where nothing goes unseen
and padded walls and no gravity
and it would need to have no doors of course.

The Flamethrowers

A month or two ago, I spent an afternoon drifting from small bookstore to bookstore looking to do something about the gender disparity among modern authors in my collection. A few books came highly recommended, including How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, which no one had in stock. I settled on professional Miranda July-impersonator, Miranda July's short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. The book, it turns out, has a sort of charm or curse on it and has gotten me into a number of weird situations that just don't seem to happen when it's not around.

But before I walked out of Myopic with July's book, I played with a heavier tome called The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. I wanted this one pretty bad. It wore an edibly attractive red and cream jacket bearing a close up of a woman's face, war-paint streaks under her eyes and two strips of tape crossing out her mouth. I wanted it bad, but fiscal concerns won out in the end: the price of July's gently used paperback—$7; the price of Kushner's new hardcover—a staggering $26.99.

That was that, at least until yesterday. Now, like everyone, I always go into a Goodwill looking for a deal. I expect to find something. I just wasn't expecting this.

This is an untouched hardcover of The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner purchased—rescued—from the bookshelves of the West town Goodwill. It's price: $1.75. All hardcovers were priced $1.75, all of those copies of the lesser works of John Grisham, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, except those marked with a special tag. This was not marked with a special tag. This was simply one of "All Hardcovers." This book, which would cost you 30 bucks across the street, was not special: not to a Goodwill serving an upscale neighborhood; not to its first owner.

With sorrow, I can only imagine that The Flamethrowers had been received as an unwanted gift from one thoughtful friend to another thoughtless one, who doubtlessly doesn't really read. It was not returned. It was not re-gifted. It was not even taken alone to a bookstore, where the thoughtless friend would have received some compensation while removing the damned nuisance from his life. It was simply given away, probably in a black Hefty bag with the rest of his unwanted junk. 

My goals for the week:

I will not take nice things for granted.
I will not be late for work.
I will send emails and texts and place phone calls just remind the people that love me that I love them back.
I will wash dishes no later than one hour after I have finished using them.
I will wash some of my dirty clothes at some point.
I will finish writing this chapter that has been killing me.
I will cut my girlfriend a lot of slack: the pressures she's under are not only legitimate, but familiar.
And instead of spending my free time on facebook, I will read the ever-loving shit out of The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.




Currently listening to:  

How do people draw from memory?

How do people draw from memory? 

I’m thinking about Olivia right now—after a couple of days with her, her face is more clear to me than my own by many orders. When I picture her in motion, she is three dimensional; so real that it flirts with hallucination. But I can’t look at her in detail. I couldn’t draw her, could I? She won't hold still. When I reduce her to lines, when I take a freeze-frame of her face straight on and try to subtract, one-by-one all of the life, depth and color that makes her the living O., when I try to make her a kind of constellation of places I could drop my pen, the result looks ridiculous and like no one.

How do they do it? Is there a process? Is there a trick? Is all of art like this and everything I write that I remember just some soulless sketch resembling nothing?

This is very distressing.

MAGIC

A year ago, I wanted real magic to exist in the world. That was all it was: one wish from the bottom of my heart filtered through the intelligent mind's most permeable sectors. But only a few seconds after wishing it to life, I knew that magic was not a thing just anybody could have. Whatever my democratic spirit, magic was clearly dangerous in the wrong hands. Others would never learn to wield it all. We were traveling down the interstate from Chicago to St. Louis—Sara, Byrne and I—and it seemed best to confine the eminence of magic to the cabin of our little car.

One good spell is all the world needs. Just one. And if you really, really mean it, it will work every time and forever. I really believe that.



Listening to:

GRAVITY

My partner is in Oregon. I have not seen her in six days and I will not see her returned home for six more. The era—and it is an era—has already taken on a heightened degree of emotional and practical ordeal. I am never quite home without her home. I am not fixed in position at all. I am not tethered to the Earth by gravity.

I can understand why she might object to the metaphor. She might not want to be Gravity—Gravity get's a bad rap, we know. We view Gravity too negatively: Gravity as predictable; Gravity as constant; Gravity as constraint; Gravity as necessary, but tedious, obstacle as we reach for the stars. We don't regard the other fundamental forces so unsympathetically—electromagnetism gets to be sexy and nuclear forces are afforded their air of puissance and mystery—even though they'll saddle us with bigger problems down the road.

Gravity can be dangerous when tested, to be sure. Gravity kills. But Gravity also saves. Gravity sets the pancake back down in the pan after you just had to show off. Gravity aids digestion, love-making; it makes riding your bike fun instead of pointless; it keeps the dust from your pencils from floating invisibly, threateningly, into your expensive electronic equipment. Gravity teaches your body to grow strong enough to support your mass and ambition. Gravity keeps you from spinning off into dead space.

Proposition: Gravity the tough-but-fair; Gravity the nurturer; Gravity the life-giver; Gravity the meaning-maker. You'd kiss Gravity every minute if you could. You'd be a fool not to. You'd be nothing without her.

AMIS ON JOYCE

I can't channel this wretched knot of paranoid energy I have today into composition, so let me just share this unrelated(actually, now I really wonder about that) quote from a footnote in Martin Amis's memoir, Experience:

"It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer. But in his work he was a hard man. Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegan's Wake, reads like a 600-page crossword clue. But it took a hard man to write it."

BAD LAD, SAD CITY

I failed a test of character today.

I was crossing the street next to a shrunken old Uke woman (at a crosswalk--Let's not be savages) returning from J. J. Peppers with cranberry juice and lemon soda to mix with the Stoli I bought earlier, when I stepped on a piece of garbage, then over it, and kept going.

I failed to pick up some litter? No. In keeping with the motifs of the day, the universe truly bent over backward to saddle me with karmic debt. 

You see, I noticed right away that the old woman was no longer keeping up next to me. She was no more than 5 feet tall and was carrying a few plastic bags; but I was listening to "Poetic Justice" by Kendrick Lamar and Drake and strolling, positively strolling, about as slowly as I ever have strolled and allocating most of my attention to simply willing myself into a better mood. Bottom line: I couldn't have lost her unless she'd stopped walking.

That's when I turned around and really saw her, five-foot-eleven on a yoga day and 150 years on this Earth, bending over on the middle of the crosswalk to pick up the piece of whatever that now bore the black sole-print of my cheeky salmon Vans. Over my shoulder, I took a closer look at the woman's plastic bags. There were three or four of them and they were filled to nearly bursting with things I could not identify and would sooner toss in the dumpster than try.

I remember stepping on the object in the crosswalk. But I don't remember looking at it when I did. It didn't occur to me that it had just dropped from her possession. It didn't occur to me that this was a thing a real, living, breathing person with pride would own. 

I stopped for a second and just watched. I wanted very badly to do anything else: I wanted most of all to call out, "Have I done this? I'm so sorry." I wanted to retrace my steps, to bend over and pick up the object, to take her bags from her weary arms and walk them and her to her home--I prayed she had a home. I didn't do it. I didn't do anything of the sort. There is your failure of courage. There is your failure of character. I thought about all of this and I just watched, embarrassed, then turned back around and went home.

In a fable, you just know that this sort of event would portend some tragic, and probably truncated, future, the provocation of some well-deserved curse. In Chicago, it's just Chicago.

Currently vibing to: the entirety of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City by Kendrick Lamar

ALL OF US, SING ABOUT IT

For a moment at the end of my train ride home, it seemed to me that the beauteous young woman with the messy, jet black hair and the ruby red lipstick was silently mouthing along, exact word-and-verse, to a song playing in my ears alone, the unlikely "Plan A (Are Sound Version)" by the Dandy Warhols.

It was for a good while after that I still replayed this brief interlude of real magic in my head. My head actually had little to do with it—I was unanalytical, serenely credulous. I just wished that I could call her up and see what time she'd be riding our Blue Line tomorrow. Replay wasn't enough; I wanted to relive this moment. I wanted to put in another short day at work downtown and then hurry home to change before the birthday party of a new friend I really admire. I wanted to finish one great book on the walk to the station and dive right into another standing in the semi-crowded train compartment. And I wanted her to do whatever it is that she does before she runs into me. I wanted us to be the exact same people one more time.

Already, I wonder how long I will remember, without some prompting, that this thing happened at all. How long will I be able to see her painted lips curve around each lyric in their staggering synchronicity? How long will I be able to remember her face before my recall breaks it up into its constituent parts and files them with their closest cousins for long-term storage? Did she have lips like Elizabeth's? Did she have perfect eyes like Jen's? Did she have an air of Dominique to her, a blue nimbus of kept-in-check anxiety and heartache?

It's happening already. She is going away. Sitting in her chair are just things now adding up to no person, some stand-in, some imagined patchwork actress from a silent film. Oh, I am having a bad morning. I am not going to tie up this post. I am just going to go now and listen to our song.

OLA

Quite some time ago, I made out with this flirty little human from Poland. I was too drunk to be too damn charming; I kept asking what she did back in Germany and she’d say, “Poland, Germany, Europe, whatever,” too drunk herself or too cool to care. Well, I was too drunk to be charming exactly, but I didn’t miss my moment:

We were talking about LA—we both hate it—

I’ve heard it said, pearl-of-wisdom, that we all forge deep bonds more quickly over the things the we hate than the things that we love; and Los Angeles has made me a lot of friends for a place I’ve never been to as an adult.

We were talking about LA when she told me that “No one ever said what they meant and I never knew what people wanted from me.” Her shoulders pinched up as she said it, like even thinking about it now made her want to become invisible.

I told her that I agreed and that people should try to say what they feel.

“Well, I suppose you know I am very attracted to you,” I added, walking the walk, putting my money where my mouth is.

“What?” she said. I repeated myself. “Why?”

“Why? Well, you’re very beautiful,” I said—

I learned that line in a book. Seriously. Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls spits that one when his moment comes along. But Robert delivers it in his elevated diction—“Thou seemest very beautiful”—and he doesn’t know when to stop. He tacks “and more” on the end, so that the compliment reads, “Thou seemest very beautiful, and more.” That’s a killer line, but it leaves his audience wanting to know what more, and Robert lets them down with whatever forgettable thing he says next. Robert Jordan, a strategy-maker in a fucked guerilla war, should be more careful to think things through.

“Thank you,” said the flirt.

“And I like your voice,” I said. “And you make me laugh. And I think you’re great company.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

I blushed. My skin is dark and doesn’t much glow red with emotion, but beneath the surface, all of my engines of vasodilation were firing up and outwardly, my heart on my sleeve, I believe that I took on a blushing air.

She said, “Would it be alright if I kissed you?” I can only imagine that the pain of watching me squirm had become unbearable to her kind soul. Also, I looked pretty good.

“Please,” I said, and not sarcastically either. I was prepared to plead.

As sweet as this all was, it turned out to be one of those kisses: grand enthusiasm and little style; just a face-full of happy face. I didn’t know her last name (or how to spell her first one) and we were not in love, just ready to be fooled for it. Fools for love. First kisses are like that. Firsts are like that.

She was a real weirdo and I am glad that I got to kiss her for a while and that I got to see the way she smiled when I told her why I liked her—I’m not going to describe it or even try to get you close. I remember she said she had two days left before her visa expired and she was on a plane back to Germany, Poland, Europe or whatever. I think she was sad. But she said, “Why would I want to stay in a country that calls me an alien?” and I could tell she had said it a million times to all of her friends, who would probably really miss her. We laughed about it. I guess I don’t know if she ever ended up going home.

When I was young, but not that young because this was after The Girl I liked killed herself, I used to say that if things were ever so bad you were ready to do a thing like that, you should do anything else instead. Dissappear. Change your name. Join a travelling circus. Whatever. Declare your whole life a sunk cost and just start over.  I hadn't realized then that we take our pain with us—that it is in ourselves, and not our circumstances, where we really get trapped when things go dark. I thought I was clever and had cured suicide.

I'm 28 now, still clever. I like Karen O. I don't write in this blog as often as I should.

DIARIZING

Narcissistic and in a small fit of “my gut knows better,” I ignored the 54 degrees Fahrenheit temperature sworn by my iPhone app and the charged current of sunshine that poured into and warmed my apartment and I girded myself for the winter before a six-block walk to New Wave Coffee. New brown leather boots I loved dearly with faux fur lining. Tall socks that climbed half up my calves. Sturdy black tights that I got from Sara under a layer of dark denim that I got from Stephen. A red, plaid shirt under a wool hoodie under a thick green jacket that never failed me on the days the wind blew snow in circles. It was not so warm a day that I would break a sweat during the race to caffeine oasis, but it was exactly so warm a day that I would break one instantly upon setting foot into the cafe at the finish line. I struggled to catch breath that I didn’t even know I’d lost. The shop’s thermostat was girded for winter as well.

On the way, I listened to a reading of a novel I have read twice already and thought about my future. It isn’t politics, is it? I never thought the day would come when I would be tired of it, but I am very tired lately.
I write too. Often for money and without joy. I have recently begun writing things for myself again, but writing hours are feast or famine, and the joys of one and the agonies of the other annihilate each other like matter/anti-matter as far as my peace of mind is concerned.

(the music in New Wave today is good enough to make me crave a strong drink)

There is a reason that I love that book and that is because every sentence of it moves or repulses me completely. It took me six months to read through the first time I tried. I had to stop reading every few paragraphs—I had to actually close the book and hold it out at arm’s length or set it on the floor and walk away. I was that sick and in love for 470 pages and six months. Even listening to it on the walk, distracted and thinking about myself, every line half-heard gave me three new ideas for the things I would write when I reached my destination—this fucking book, this vault for every good and horrible notion I will ever have.

Once inside New Wave, sweating or whatever, winded or whatever, purchasing my coffee more by then as a genuflection toward the shop that hosted me, I could hardly contain myself. I felt giddily, hyper-lucid but floating around in a series of moon-jumps as though inflated with just the right amount of helium to keep me Earthbound but fun. I needed to write, as drearily familiar as that sounds. That is why I do it, I must accept: writing well just gets me high. It gives me fevers and chills at the same time. That rather simplifies things, doesn’t it? That rather ends the inner debate. People don’t get high because of cost-benefit analyses, people get high because high. Regardless of what I decide about myself, I’m just going to keep writing anyway. At this point, it is out of my hands.

One more thing: on the walk over while I’m mostly checking myself out in the reflective, tinted windows of the restaurants on the corner—there are things I just haven’t had opportunity to comprehend about my gait—I catch an older black gentleman swerving grandly on the wide sidewalk and coming my way. Grandly? Well, he seemed pleased with himself, anyway. He seem to own the sidewalk. With a scrutinizing look, I suspect I would have noticed by the qualities of his face, sweater, overcoat and boots that he was homeless, mentally infirm or drunk, or at least very unstylishly poor. He was black, however, and when they are old and black I try not to look with much scrutiny at all. I blame that on my youth, my blackness, my enthusiasm for alcohol and occasionally bouts with severe depression, and my cultivated, stylish poverty.

The man took a sudden glance across the street as if he were surprised to find it there, and decided to cross right where he was. The thing is that even though Chicago has been warmer for a few days and most of the curb is now thawed and dry from the snow and ice that was an inconvenient constant for the preceding four months, he happened to have turned right parallel to a spot that was inexplicably hampered by two inches of deep black slush. I watched with horror as he took his first step towards it. Surely he will maneuver a foot to the right or left and avoid it entirely, I thought. He took another step. The third step was faster than the first two so before I had time to make my peace with it, there he was right in the slush. Then he stepped out into the street and out of my frame of view.

He was exactly who I thought he was, I could not help but decide, because no one else would be so indifferent about their shoes.



Currently listening to:

MASTURBATION

Today, I discovered myself unexpectedly aroused by the first paragraph of the second chapter of a book. Neither the chapter, nor the book as a whole, is intentionally erotic—the paragraph in question describes only a young composer’s dream that smashing up a fine china shop produces musical notes for a perfect new movement—and I can offer no accounting of my surprising physical reaction other than the rapturous qualities of the prose. One might suppose that, enthralled with the text, my unconscious mind paid no notice to the source of a few powerful feelings stirred up within me and simply became... confused. Exuberant and confused.

No matter. It amuses me to think that I might "delight" in anything. Polymorphously perverse is what Woody Allen called it; but let's not get carried away.

I take some relief that there is no stigma attached yet to arousal towards a non-sexual passage of a book, just as there is no stigma for arousal at anything for which such arousal has no common name. Had it been arousal at the character, a young and talented man, easy on the eyes if his story is to be believed, why that might have implied Homosexuality, a thing with a name and a legacy. Had it been the pages themselves which set me off, reminding me in texture of the undoubtedly handsome tree which once fell to produce them, one might consider that Dendrophilia, another thing with a name, has played its shameful part. Now that would be something awful.

But no, it was the words, the delicate phrasing and that familiar spirit of creative destruction they detail.

I had the option, of course, to ignore the issue into atrophy. Instead, I decided that the time was right to break up my day with a shower. I satisfied my urges, but did not overindulge, barely calling to mind a rapid slideshow of erotic memories to speed physiology along: a face I had seen, a pair of breasts I once held in one hand to see that I could, a whisper, a secret I'd almost forgotten, a red-lipped smile, a song strummed for me at sunrise, a kiss. These fantasies flew by one after another and back again, fleeting, shimmering and thousand fold, great flung handfuls of glitter.

And now, God willing, a pleasant afternoon.