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.