I was crossing through Gowanus on Union Street the other day when I saw the most beautiful light coming through the scrim of a pair of enormous, undulating curtains. I was just west of that parody of urban water features, the Gowanus canal, in the spate of warehouses and rowhouses between the pollution and South Brooklyn Casket Company.
The curtains marked one of those truck-sized garage door-type entrances to a warehouse, and a breeze was blowing them gently back and forth in harmonic motion. Coming through the curtains and spilling out from under them were creamy globs of late-afternoon winter sunshine, pouring into the vast space behind the curtains from a large window on the other side of the warehouse and a skylight up above.
I watched the curtains ripple from across the street for a while and reflexively reached for my phone to photograph them. (Isn't it strange that when we want to take a picture, we reach for our telephones? If you told me when I first pressed the shutter on a camera that I would one day make telephone calls with it I would not have believed you.) But the phone had summarily died about half an hour earlier.
Not being able to photograph the rippling curtains brought me a certain kind of relief. I knew already that the photograph would not do justice to what I was seeing. Even a video that captured the curtains' movement would not be entirely accurate. Only I could see what I could now see. I could never really show it to anyone else.
The walls around the big door were green. The curtains were cream-colored and looked fine and expensive, not like the utilitarian strips of rubber or vinyl that sometimes hang in big warehouse doors, to keep the heat in. Looking at the curtains I began to feel the heartbreak I often feel when I see something beautiful and I am all alone. It is not the sadness that the light will soon change or I will walk on and the moment will end and no one will know about it, or that I will try to explain it and no one will understand. Or rather, it is not only that sadness. It is also the ecstasy of all those things, the ecstasy of seeing this thing, all by myself, and not only not being able to share it with anyone but not having to.
I crossed the street to look closer. I touched the curtains and when I did I could feel they were warm. It was a cold day and the warehouse was heated. I could hear the fans blowing, loudly, behind the curtains. They puffed out and sucked in and as they sucked in they parted and as they parted I stepped inside.
The building was large, old and nearly empty. It had a vaulted ceiling with interlocking rafters and a high, dirty skylight. Old buildings, old wood, old glass and complicated geometry all excite me in the same way the curtains had. I took a sharp breath. I felt stoned without being stoned.
The warehouse was not completely empty. There were a few rows of red velvet theater chairs. There was a platform or pedestal covered with dozens of white candles stalagtitic with drips. At one end there was a kind of office, demarcated by windows of mottled glass with transoms in them. Through the glass I could see different colored bottles and the shapes of hangers. Did someone live there? Was it a performance space? A prop loft?
I stood just inside the curtains, warming. They rustled behind me like sailcloth. The light was inside was like church. The noise of the heaters surged, then quieted. I heard another noise, similar, buzzing. Someone was sawing something. It was coming from above.
I looked up and saw no one. The power saw whined again. Then someone banged, four thwacks. Then more power saw, more thwacking. It sounded like someone was cutting a hole in the ceiling from above. What would I say when they came through and I was standing here? I decided, for no particular reason I could fathom, that I would say I was looking for Bobby.
I would ask what sort of a place this was, a residence or maybe a club or maybe just still a warehouse after all. I'd ask if I could look around. I'd ask if I could come back and take a picture of the curtains. Even if it ruined the moment, I'd try. I'd bring my old film camera and do it right. I'd charm whoever was up there with the saw, I'd gain access to this space, its warmth and light. I was infatuated with this empty space. I was trying to be around it and with it and in it the way you try to be around a person who infatuates you.
The sawing and banging continued, but no one emerged from the ceiling. It was dark up there and hard to see, especially with the bright spots of light coming from the windows and skylight. The light made it hard to focus your eyes in the shadows.
While I waited for someone to come through the ceiling, I began to resent whoever was sawing and banging in this beautiful warehouse empty of everything but red velvet theater seats and dozens of half-burned white candles and sunlight and translucent curtains. I became confused about whose warehouse it was. I was beginning to see the soon-to-drop-through-the-roof-sawyer-and-banger as an intruder when it was I who was the intruder. I did not want to share. And so I stepped back through the curtains, out onto the street, and the moment stayed mine.
On the Proper Placement of the Gideon Bible in the Home
The Bible guys were all over the neighborhood the other day, practically on every corner. "Would you like a Bible? Would you like a free Bible?"
Unlike many yoga practitioners, I do not believe that your average street-corner proselytizer "might be the next Messiah." Though proselytizers appear to be trying to convince the public of their beliefs, I believe that it is really themselves they are trying to convince, and often unconvincingly at that. If you really have found the One True Way, isn't the explosive glowing light of your One True Way evident to others without your street-corner shouting or door-to-door salesmanship?
After all the wars and priestly buggery of children I'm deeply wary of anyone who claims to act in the name of God. God seems to tell a lot of people to do a lot of things, not all of them advisable. Claiming that "God told me to" is just as sure a sign of psychosis and terrorism as it is holiness. Maybe God told you to hand out Bibles or menorahs on the street, but He also apparently had different instructions for George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and a host of other zealots bent on killing people or inserting themselves in the private lives of others and imposing rules upon them that they themselves do not follow. God is a shady character and He's got His hand in everything, the bad and the ugly as well as the good. Goddamn easily manipulated imaginary omnipresent being. Goddamn God.
Not that I don't understand what it's like to think God is talking to you. I will confess that God has spoken to me on a number of occasions. Mostly S/He was nice, except that time S/He told me the light fixture was evil and I was afraid of it for hours. That was a rough few hours, and though I asked the Lord to help me, or help me help myself, the Lord did not come to my aid. My staunch atheist friend Holly did, and for those few hours she was God to me. (Or did God come to my aid in the form of Holly? Does Holly think there is no God because she IS God? Should I stand on the corner and tell everyone about Holly?)
Overall, God has indeed told me some very good news. God told me that the universe is All One, that all beings are One Consciousness and One Love, that the divine spark of all that has ever been and all that will ever be lives in me, and that I need not fear death nor anything else because whatever happens is part of everything, and everything IS everything. Then God often tells me to take off all my clothes and go swimming immediately! Then God often rewards my righteousness by allowing me to drink tremendous amounts of whiskey and sleep very little and wake up feeling fantastic. But this might be because when I talk to God I am using the AT & T One-Rate Psilocybin Plan.
Just because God told me all this stuff does not mean I have to tell everyone else all about it. If God wants to talk to everyone else I trust God will contact them directly, or they will contact God directly. Though I have come to something resembling a fleeting flyby of Total Consciousness on a variety of hallucinogenic drugs, I am not going to stand on a street corner and give out pamphlets about my experiences on hallucinogenic drugs. Yoga class has also been quite enlightening, but I am not going to drag strangers to Summer's 12:30 Intermediate Vinyasa, no matter how much it has done for me personally.
Yoga has done so much for me personally that I believe yoga is going to ultimately lead me to a positive way of dealing with proselytizers. When I've done enough yoga I'll either be sanguine enough to ignore them or strong enough to lift them off the ground by the lapels and promise them a conversion they'll never forget.
A good friend of mine told me she was sent to Bible camp one summer and every day she was asked if she'd been saved yet. She was getting bored so one day she said, yeah, she was saved. From that day on they put her in the Saved Kids group, which had totally different and better activities than the pre-Saved (Eternally Damned?) kids group. Apparently if you weren't saved yet you spent all day being terrorized about hell in hopes that this would get you to embrace Jesus and be saved, but if you were saved you could just play sports and go swimming. Of course, what you were really "saved" from was being told you needed to get saved, and the entity doing the saving was not Jesus but you yourself, and what you were getting saved from was not the burning fires of hell but being told all day about the burning fires of hell.
I've often wondered what the bunks were called at this camp. Instead of problematically naming them after rapidly disappearing woodland animals or already-disappeared Native American tribes, was there a bunk called "Girls Purgatory?"
I, too, count myself among the saved. I've been saved dozens of times. I've been saved from some of the illusions of establishment capitalism and frustrations of so-called American democracy by my massive authority problem. I've been saved from boredom by my inability to make eye contact with people who bore me. I've been saved from loneliness by my inability to resist contact with those who intrigue me. Art has saved me and nature has saved me, and helmets, life vests and airbags have all saved me. The dumb luck that has allowed some of the quite stupidly dangerous things I've done to turn out all right in the end has saved me many times over. I'm pretty sure I'm saved already, but I maintain no illusions that I can save anyone else.
I do, however, take great pleasure in profaning. I tremendously enjoy doing whatever it is anyone thinks is most unholy at the sites and times of their supposed greatest holiness. I do so love to "accidentally" brush up against Hasidic men who are afraid of touching unclean women, imagining that I have just sent them into paroxysms of cleansing davening. I do so love to eat hallucinogenic drugs in state parks on Yom Kippur, the holiday of Jewish atonement. I do so love to drink beer on the grounds of the Mormon Temple. Beer just tastes better when everyone around believes that each sip adds fizzy fuel to your own hellfire. The imaginary hellfires of others are a pleasing warm glow in my belly.
Street-corner prosyletizers, however, are harder to profane, and worse, they caught me right after yoga. For about fifteen minutes after yoga you are, temporarily, Saved, and in the worst way, too, the way that takes away your desire to fuck with others for your own amusement. You are saved from the worst afflictions of all humankind, namely the chattering prison of the mind and the illusion that we are separate consciousnesses. They always tell you in yoga that you have to make those fifteen minutes last longer, that if you would just unblock or unlock all your chakras you could be that nice to everyone all day and also bring about world peace with your mind. Then they tell you that your chakras are only totally open at the moment of orgasm. Then they tell you to come to downward dog.
I experience a lot of emotions during yoga, including anxiety, rage, vanity, transcendence, bliss, confusion, horniness, the distinct and remarkable absence of horniness, and something that hints at enlightenment, if enlightenment were a far-off and cruelly elusive orgasm. These emotions are not that different from the ones I experience the rest of the time, but after yoga, I am inevitably calmer than I was before, if nothing else because of the stretching. You can't stretch that much and not get at least a little calmer.
And so when the fourth and final Bible guy proffered the leatherette volume, I took it, already congratulating myself on being so open to everything, already chipping away at any real openness to everything with my awareness of my supposed openness to everything. I took the Bible because I finally took a good look at the Bibles and noticed that they were little mini-Bibles and were covered in orange leatherette, and I found them quite cute and attractive.
I also took the Bible because it had the words "Psalms and Proverbs" on the cover, and I remembered that I greatly enjoy reading Psalms, in particular Psalm 23, which is like the "Stairway to Heaven" of Psalms. I always find my tastes to be disappointingly un-obscure when it comes to Great Works and yet I rarely find these Great Works overrated. While I do not trust that great art will be appreciated in its own time, I do find the things that have endured to be pretty reliably awesome. Psalm 23 gives me the chills, even when read nasally at funerals by the moronic rent-a-rabbis necessitated by my family of atheists.
Despite all my grumbling and ranting, I will sometimes go around reciting this psalm to myself, alternating it with my continuing attempts to memorize "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It spooks me out and then it comforts me and then it downright inspires me. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Fuck yeah! (Or rather, Fuck yea!) And thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me is so fantastically kinky. I have none of the academic inclination to prove this in some dusty dissertation, but I am certain that that line and possibly the whole psalm was written by a gay guy as a secret eternal love poem to his lover. Hot! Were I the proprietor of my own gay bar I'd call it Thy Rod and Thy Staff. Or maybe that would be the microbrew I would serve at the gay bar, where your cup runneth over.
The Bible came with a little table of contents where you could look up psalms appropriate to your particular problems. The entires included: "Afraid," "Anxious," "Defeated," "Depressed," "Failed by Friends," "Trouble, In," "Depravity," "Drunkeness," "Enemies," "Excuses," and "Worldliness." While I did not find the psalms to which I was directed particularly relevant to my current personal issues in these areas, I admired the indexing.
Once I brought the Bible home, I was confused about what to do with the damn thing. I was tempted to put it on the shelf next to my equally miniature book of Yoga Sutras. (I seem to be able to procure spiritual texts only in teeny-tiny sizes, for reasons that seem fairly obvious.) But that didn't make total sense. One of the afflictions of being a Virgo (astrology being another mode of thought I often dismiss as hooey and then find redeeming truth in) is the unshakable feeling that there is a place for everything and everything should be in its place. I felt that there was a right place for the Gideon Bible I had willingly taken from the man in the cheap suit with the creepy smile, and I was determined to find it.
When I purchased my three-drawered mirrored nightstand two things did not occur to me. One, that glass attracts and shows a lot of dust, and my nightstand would always be dirty and two, that the presence of a large, horizontal mirrored surface in my bedroom would never cease to connote powdered stimulant drugs. It did occur to me that a logical organizing principle for the three drawers would be sex, drugs and rock & roll. But it's hard to fit rock & roll in a drawer, so it's more like sex, drugs and extra notebooks. The traditional resting place of the Gideon Bible is the top drawer of the nightstand. I invite you to meditate on what is in the top drawer of your nightstand, and what might be reasonably expected to be in the top drawer of any adult's nightstand. And now my miniature orange leatherette Gideon Bible dwells among these objects, and that drawer brings me pleasure on yet another level.
A sad thing involving an insect happened on the river this summer. I was riding in my brother's boat with an incredibly cheerful middle-aged man and his two incredibly well-adjusted teenage daughters. It was a perfect early-summer late-afternoon, not too hot but just hot enough to make jumping in the river and drying off in the sun equally pleasurable. The rapids were behind us and the current was with us and soon we'd pull into camp and splash the sun-warmed rafts with water and lie back on them with ice-cold beers dangling our feet in the river as one of the year's longest days ended slow and golden.
My brother was entertaining the passengers, as river guides often do, by casually sharing interesting facts about our surroundings. He rowed while we paddled and talked while we listened, giving a brief history of the Rogue River Valley. Native Americans had lived and hunted and fished here before white settlers came. The settlers attacked the Indians unprovoked, killed many of them even after they'd surrendered and moved the rest of them to reservations. A century of mining then polluted the river before it was re-classified as Wild and Scenic and became the rafting mecca it now is.
There was even hope to found in that sad story, if not for all the exterminated natives then in the redemption of the river from industrial pollution. Humanity was fucked, or would fuck itself, but nature still stood a chance. Maybe nature itself would bring the revolution on--maybe if middle managers came out to the wilderness enough it would blow their minds to the point where they would destroy capitalism from the inside.
Suddenly I was filled with hope, that things could turn around, could change for the better, or move forward, or at least go back to the way they were. The teenage girls were fearless and their father was easy on the eyes. This gave me hope for the next generation of women, hope for the attractiveness of men well into middle age, hope that some had spirits so cheerful even middle management couldn't break them. I had hope for the polluted rivers and hope for my paddling skills in them.
I had hope that one day all of these meaningless ideas would give way to all of this incredible natural beauty, or maybe one day the ideas would take a form as beautiful as the natural beauty. Maybe one day my own ideas would dissolve into nature, and I would dissolve into nature, and live here in its peace and chaos, in its truth and beauty, it is perfect order and its higher laws, its economy of ecology. I would stop resisting laws and the idea of laws because I would live in accordance with the only laws not made by men.
"A bee!" exclaimed the middle manager, and my brother slapped at it reflexively, but it was not a bee and he did not kill it. It was a fly and he only maimed it. "Oh, sorry," he joked. "This is supposed to be an environmentally conscious trip!" He placed the fly on the tube of the raft and resumed rowing.
I bent over it, intending to flick it into the river, but momentarily looked closer. One of the fly's legs was crushed and one of its wings, though still attached, was cockeyed and wasn't working. It was trying to fly but couldn't anymore. I put down my paddle and picked up the injured fly and sat on the floor of the raft.
Its attempts to fly with one working wing kept causing it to flip over. I tried to gently nudge its broken wing back into place, but even when I did it wasn't connected the right way and didn't move. I was surprised the wing didn't crumble into dust when I touched it. The more I touched and nudged fly, the more I realized that it wasn't really so fragile, it was just very small.
I came to see all its perfect parts, orange eyes and shimmering white body and wiggling antennae, details of great precision and complexity beyond the gross facts of buzz or bite. The longer and closer I looked the more worthy of life it seemed, the more valiant its struggle and the more tragic and irreparable its destruction. It was helpless and I was helpless to help it.
When we got to camp I jumped hastily out of the raft and hurried the fly away, as if separating it from all the activity, the tying and unloading of the boats, would somehow heal or pacify it. I put it on a rock and it tried to crawl and fly away, flipping over and unable to right itself. It was dawning on me that the fly was never going to fly again and could hardly walk and would soon die of its injuries or be eaten by its predator and the humane thing to do would be to kill it and put it out of what I assumed was its insect misery.
But I couldn't bring myself to squash it and end the life it was fighting so hard to keep. I would choose a moment and reach for a rock (I had for some reason decided that the deed should be done with a rock and not my bare hand), but the fly was still so pathetically alive that I could not reconcile myself to my own power, even if it was the humane thing to do. Even though it was suffering and dying it was still alive now and trying to stay that way, and who was I to change that?
Of course the frog or bigger bug or bird that would later eat the fly wouldn't see the fly's struggle, only act out of its own animal instinct for food. And even my brother had only acted out of reflex, that sub-cerebral part of us that responds to a threat before we can think, that is wired into our spinal cords and not our brains. And the man who'd pointed out what he thought was a bee was only being polite, if not protecting his young, a civilized behavior coupled with a primal instinct. The fly was a victim of mistaken identity and pure accident. Its end had come with less malice than the one that came for the Indians of the Rogue River Valley. As brutal as we are toward nature we seem to reserve the worst of our barbarism for one another.
The fly was in the state he was in due to instinct, reflex and accident, but in trying to finish him off I was coming from the opposite end of things, from consideration and rumination. I was trying to understand nature but I was applying all this human thought to it, and in so doing had undone my instincts to the point where they were not helping me and I could not act. One instinct told me to care for the broken thing I had come to love, and another told me to end this, whatever this was, the life of the fly and my own imposition of meaning on it.
The saddest part was that I knew that beneath my debate that there was no meaning to be found in the arbitrary borders of life and death. My attachment to this small suffering thing in the last agonized moments of its life was itself an illusion and as much as I tried to understand what the fly was feeling and what was best for the fly with all my paltry thoughts and words the fly was feeling something for which neither it nor I had language, and even this torturous experience would soon end, by my hand (if I could summon the courage) or not (if I kept on being a coward). I could say that the fly was struggling bravely but I don't know if bravery entered into it. The fly struggled because he did not want to die, just as the man pointed and my brother slapped because they did not want to get stung, just as we all go on trying not to die and not to suffer pain even though both of these things will happen.
I couldn't decide whether I was Mother Teresa or Dr. Menegle, whether I was keeping the fly company while it suffered or cruelly observing its pain from a scientific remove that had gone beyond inquiry toward sadism. I didn't want the fly to feel alone and yet I couldn't really share his pain. I didn't want the fly to suffer and yet I did not have the courage to end his suffering. And so I was both very kind and very cruel, not unlike how we understand nature or God to be. I felt pretty wretched myself, despite the golden sunlight and cold beers I knew were waiting and afternoon of alternating rapids and calm stretches with no flat water. A cold dark sadness came through me, in many ways the saddest thing I've ever felt, a sadness not to do just with me but with all things and the circumstances under which they live and die.
New York is buildings and money, food and drink, glances and remarks. It is streets, not roads. It is filth, not dirt. It is noise, not sounds. It is highways, not freeways, five hour drives of one hundred miles in stop-and-go traffic instead of five hour drives of four hundred miles doing 80. It is rats, not gophers, pigeons, not herons, roaches, not moths. It is weather, not natural disasters, humidity, not fog.
In New York, money flows in and out at high volume. Everything costs at least $4, and more likely $8, or $15, or $35, or $80. The background panic of New York very often has to do with money, and if not money, time. But bears never cross my mind.
New York is appointments, constantly being made, rescheduled and pushed back in increments of fifteen minutes. In the West vague plans are made and rarely spoken of until the moment of their execution or expiration. In New York, someone might send a preliminary email, text, or Facebook message (rarely, these days, a phone call) inquiring as to one's availability this week or next week. Or someone may simply express the desire to get together, followed immediately by a statement of the impossibility of getting together. Negotiations are then open. Should it be dinner or drinks or coffee or brunch? Who has work and where and when? I'm free after 9. I'm free until 7:45. Call me when you finish rehearsal. Call me when you get out of work. Still at work! Still uptown! I'm supposed to go to my friend's reading/opening/show. Maybe I can get you on the list. I'm at the show, where r u? It was so great to see you, sorry we didn't get to talk more because it was my reading/opening/show. Sorry we missed your reading/opening/show, but let's get a drink after! Text me when you're done! Now I'm tired, going home! Would love to see you but I'm filming/recording/performing/on tour/on call/working nights until Sunday, until September. So sorry, I'm running half an hour late! Order without me! Get me some to go! Meet us inside! We're in the back! We were there, but now we're not! The show got cancelled! The party got moved! I fell asleep watching The Wire! We're leaving for Oaxaca! We were just in Tulum!
On the West Coast, planning is more like this. Let's go camping/hiking/rafting/climbing/surfing next week. Is it time to go camping/hiking/rafting/climbing/surfing now? Oh, sorry, I'm five hundred miles away camping/hiking/rafting/climbing/surfing somewhere else. Yes, it is time. Okay, where do we meet? Three hundred miles from where you are. Start driving!
Or alternately, people live in small towns where you never lock your door and everyone's recently or long-ago ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend comes in at any moment to borrow tortillas and you never text or call or make plans because everyone is going to the same potluck, bar, show or party, where plans can continue to not be made and local gossip can be discussed. Or no one is even going anywhere at all, they are just being. But if you get the urge to camp, hike, climb, raft or surf it can be accomplished very nearby, often before dinner.
People go to a lot of festivals out West, where you camp and there is music and many types of vegan and non-vegan burritos. By the time I came back East, the Oregon Country Fair was a distant memory and Stringfest was over a month ago. The Organic Planet Festival had just gone down in Eureka and Burning Man was about to draw so many people from the Bay Area that the city decided it was an opportune time to close down the Bay Bridge for construction. Earthdance was on the horizon and everybody was making plans for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
In New York there are film festivals I have little hope of attending since my one seriously connected film friend went to grad school in the Czech Republic. There is no camping at these festivals. There are celebrities and interns and laminated badges and panel discussions with glasses of water.
Time and space are very different on the West Coast. Traffic is hardly a factor. In the eight weeks in the West I was stuck in traffic for exactly one hour, trying to get over the Golden Gate Bridge on the 101 on a Sunday afternoon. Once outside the cities there is very little traffic. There are instead very evocative and terse road signs that say things like "ROCKS" or "ELK" or have graphics depicting sharp curves or steep grades, which are redundant to the three-dimensional versions of these things on which you are currently driving.
In New York, you do not wear Chacos, fleece, zip-off hiking pants, board shorts or belts made from the webbing used to rig rafts or climbing routes unless this gear is actively in use. People are not routinely covered in a myriad of healing scars and abrasions of unknown provenance. The most common scars of unknown provenance are bruises to the head from crowd surfing and really vicious injuries from urban bike accidents.
Most people in New York are quite thin. Most people are quite pale. Tans are remarked upon with and combination of suspicion and admiration. Everybody knows you didn't get that extra melanin here.
New York is outfits, not clothes. The time and attention given to one's outfit in New York can only be appreciated by leaving New York. In New York dressing is a performance and a form of self-expression. New York is an aesthetic experience and your job here is to contribute to the aesthetic. Even when you think you're not, you are.
Though the L train fashion show effect is often contemptuously lamented, there are days when I walk the Lorimer platform like a catwalk and then stand in awe of the collective effort this group has expended on dressing. There is a deep satisfaction in being part of such a fleeting, superficial moment, in being one of several hundred people standing stonefaced and uneasily posing in a public space, engaged in the activity of being ourselves. It's so exhibitionistic and narcissistic it becomes beautiful in its singularity of purpose. It's like one of those sand paintings Buddhist monks make, the ones their masters then sweep away.
Many people are drawn to New York by a desire for self-creation, to remake themselves before a captive audience of millions. There seems to be a tacit agreement among the citizens of New York to work on some undefined project together, a project of seeing and becoming and watching and ignoring.
The old story of Western migration is also one of re-creation, but often through achieving mastery over or oneness with the land. In the West the land is so big and we are so small it feels at times like it's all headed toward dissolution. In New York the final product is the self, and the outfits. The personality of the lifer New Yorker gets bigger and bigger until he or she can be drawn with a few broad strokes, like a Hirschfeld cartoon, or summed up in a single pithy remark, like a New Yorker caption.
In the West clothes have a purpose. If they convey something to others it's often one's activities as much as subculture. Somehow on the West Coast clothes just become clothes again, and everyone gets naked sooner or later anyway to jump in the swimming hole or soak in the hot springs.
New York is a performance rather than an experience. Sometimes you are on stage and sometimes you are a spectator, but someone is always watching or listening. Even if you don't leave your apartment you'll hear death threats, stock tips and an average of one stranger's orgasm per week. In a single block you can field a compliment on your outfit, glare at a dirty remark, sneer at a bad driver, refuse two beggars, give generously to a third, feel guilty about your arbitrary nature, decline an offer for drugs, and read the headlines of three major newspapers, while reporting all of it to the internet on the phone, while also talking on the phone. Out West your phone will lose reception and then it will just die before you can charge it.
On the West Coast people are brought close by sharing experiences as much as by talking. You DO things, often in places where you can't even talk, because of the high winds or rushing water or the fact that you are separated from your buddy by hundreds of feet of rope. Rather than talk about other things they did, thoughts they had and things they saw, people do things together. I suppose they talk about them during and after. I certainly did. But no one on the West Coast talks as much as I do.
Everyone talks more in the East, and louder and faster. Everyone is visibly more nervous. Everyone is more actively interested in getting the last word. New York is first and foremost and always and forever a battle of wits.
In the East more people are on psychotropic medications, or speak freely of being so. In the West more people are getting stoned, or speak freely of doing so.
In the East when you smoke at a height and contemplate the moon you're out on the six-story fire escape. Out West it's a giant boulder. In the East when we settle in to drink we stay in one place. Out West just when you think we're really unwinding with our drinks and our smokes and our lounging positions, someone jumps up and commences another wilderness activity, or goes to bed in preparation for an upcoming early-morning wilderness activity. No one stays up all night, hardly ever. Plenty of perfectly healthy able-bodied young people go to bed before midnight.
You can pee at will in a hell of a lot more places out West. In New York your outdoor peeing options are limited to the space between the fenders of two parked cars, the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge at night and the odd dark alley. But of course there are almost as many bars in the city as there are trees in the woods.
Out West people leave the house with a full set of camping gear in their cars because they may at any given moment spend the night up a mountain. Out West you can decide to go camping at the last minute, because you don't have to rent a car and borrow a tent and drive three hours in summer Friday rush hour traffic to get to a litter-strewn campground full of various ethnic youth groups. Out West many people have beds or the makings of beds in their cars or trucks or buses or vans. Out West many of the cars are trucks or buses or vans.
Out West people really do say "rad," "gnarly" and "sick," and these words have specific and apt meanings. In New York no one says "rad," "gnarly," or "sick." This may be because nothing in New York is "rad," "gnarly" or "sick." Things in New York are "crazy" or "awesome" or "interesting" or "a nightmare" or "totally fucking insane." Out West they say "rage" when they mean "party."
I am out of my element out West. I don't know if there really are bears or snakes everywhere or everyone is just fucking with me, I don't know until I find out that you can drive up that steep dirt road, that you can jump into that river, that you can climb that tree. I don't know where the secret trails and swimming holes are. Back East I know things. I know where you can get a cab, and how to dart ahead in the crowd to make the train, how to tell who is getting off at the next stop so I can have their seat, which trains run local after rush hour, which trains don't run at all, which subway transfers are labyrinthine and which are expedient, where to cross the park when, how to get the bartender to notice me, how to sneak into certain venues, when various restaurants will be fatally crowded and when you might get a table, where to find just about any kind of food at any hour, and where all the delis are. This knowledge is of no use to me out West.
Just before 2 a.m. I had a sudden craving for peonies so I went out to the very expensive deli in pursuit of them. There were no peonies, however, only a team of Latin American laborers restocking the juice and milk display.
It was too beautiful an almost-summer night for anyone to be shopping. Everyone was out on the street instead. I had already walked the length of the neighborhood earlier that evening and found the streets unusually alive, even for the Southside, where every night is an all-out block party. Tonight was an especially big one. Even more old men were sitting at their folding tables, more teenagers were pushing and shoving each other on and off of chain-link fences, more cars were parked with all four doors open and music blaring.
I've lived in this neighborhood long enough for each street corner to harbor its own memories, ranging from the monumental to mundane. There is the awning where I waited out that terrific rainstorm and there is exactly the spot where that horrible fight I had with that boyfriend started and that's the lampost I once had a long conversation with while drunk. When I walk by these corners I sometimes imagine that I am in a Back-to-the-Future-esque time warp and can actually see the ghosts of my other selves crowding the streets with a history significant only to me. Then I reproach myself for being narcissistic and not living in the moment, and I try to say goodbye to the past while also admonishing it to stay there, but it never does, and all my former selves go on about their business, dripping wet, screaming mad or crying drunk as they may be.
Tonight I approached the block party of today and the ghosts of yesteryear from the lordly height of the elevated train platform. I stepped off the stairs and almost directly onto a discarded condom. I am always confounded by used condoms on the street. If there are so many used condoms in the street how come we never find people having sex there? Or do people have sex in cars and throw the condoms into the street? Whenever I see a used condom, no matter how grossed out I am, I am always pleased to see that at least someone is practicing safe sex.
Perhaps because of the used condom, I became preoccupied that the woman walking ahead of me was a hooker. She was dressed like the Halloween or Hollywood version of a hooker--black miniskirt, leopard print tube top, black boots. She wore it like she was at work, like this outfit was part of her dress code. Maybe she is just confident in her body, I thought for a moment. But there was something about her exposed flesh that made it seem not entirely her own.
In the basement-level religious paraphernalia store a cherubic toddler was walking amongst the candles. A guy was trying to talk a girl into coming into a club with him, softly, sweetly, insistently. On one empty block I smelled weed and looked up to see a young guy contemplatively smoking a joint in a darkened doorway. I looked away so he wouldn't feel watched, even though I wanted to smile at him, a smile that would say, right on, man. Tattered Dominican flags crisscrossed the street, their shreds hanging in dignified desecration.
My street is on the decidedly Italian side of the neighborhood and accordingly marked by an enormous green, white and red flag that that appears to float transparently when backlit by the streetlamps. On the cross street there is an equally large American flag that I am prone to staring at for long periods of time on my way home, thinking about America and all its crimes and complications. I will meditate on this transparent flag for several minutes, standing in the middle of the street, hoping for a singular revelation about the empire to make itself known to me.
In the space of ten blocks I had passed under three different flags. Then I went home and watched Pollock. After that sad story I needed something bright and hopeful to clear my head. It was such a well-made movie, such a pointlessly tragic story. A very talented artist drank too much and wasn't very nice to the people around him, achieved fame, was largely misunderstood and then died, taking an unlucky girl with him. Out into the night I went for peonies, the opposite of abstract alcoholic suicide.
Metropolitan Avenue was as crowded as I'd ever seen it at any time of day. Little kids were still riding their bikes and pregnant women fanned themselves on stoops. The L train was terminating at Lorimer and running buses on the rest of the line. Several hundred people were lined up at the corner like patient refugees of a hipster exodus. I imagined that as the recession worsened and the trust funds diminished and the graphic design jobs grew fewer and further between and rents went unpaid for too long, buses would line up at Union and Metropolitan to take the hipsters to refugee camps where they would construct roofing out of found materials that would win design awards. "We left with little more than the iPods in our tote bags," people would say decades later, when the grant monies came in for the oral histories. "And we never saw our overpriced apartments again."
On one corner a woman was screaming into a cell phone, "I swear on my daughter I will call the cops on you!" and on the next corner another woman was screaming into a pay phone something similar. The woman on the pay phone started beating the boxy part of the phone with the receiver while the woman with the cell phone continued screaming, pacing and gesticulating. What if they could switch phones and keep yelling, I wondered. Would whoever made them each so angry notice the difference in pitch? Kellogg's Diner's new neon sign was flashing away in its garish fuchsia and I was thinking how dramatic it would be to walk the catwalk surrounding that new neon sign, how if Back to the Future was remade in Williamsburg the climactic moment could occur not on the clock tower but on the Kellogg's Diner sign. Instead of driving really fast in a DeLorean the hero would have to catch an L train before the doors closed. In the window of the fancy restaurant I used to frequent before my more extreme poverty set in I watched a waiter drink wine at the only table without its chairs up, in the bright light that marks the end of the evening. I passed the stop sign where I once met eyes with the famous actor who died young and almost stepped on another used condom. Must be spring fever, I thought, everybody's doin' it and there are no peonies to be had in Brooklyn tonight.
In an effort to reduce paper waste and maximize efficiency I signed up for paperless billing on all my bills. Then I created a separate email account for all the bill-paying reminders to go to, so my regular email account would not be tainted with such unpleasantness as bill-paying. I also use this account for Netflix and Amazon and anything I suspect might send too many emails not filled with salient details from the lives of my friends and family. As a result, this special "all-business" email account is so boring that I never check it unless I happen to actually remember that I ordered something online and want to know where it is. (I do most of my online shopping drunk late at night and therefore am often completely and pleasantly surprised when the packages arrive seven to ten business days later.) "Paperless billing" has become, for me, "bill-less billing." Bill-less billing has been a fantastic solution to the annoying problem of bills arriving in the mailbox and the ensuing financial challenge of paying them.
As a result of my new bill-less billing system I did not pay my Con Edison bill for six months. Though I had been paying the bills online and having the reminders sent to my special boring email address, the account was still in my former roommate's name. When they started sending notices about the imminent shutting off of my power it was forwarded to her new address and she alerted me to the matter of the unpaid Con Edison bill. When I finally read the three shut-off notices she had collected I noticed that Con Edison is willing to negotiate. They put you on a payment plan and provide a phone number to call if you just "need more time" to pay the bill. It says, "Call this number if you just need more time!" I was really touched by their understanding but had no desire to draw this out. I had a boyfriend who let his power get shut off with twenty pounds of Omaha steak in his freezer. I have seen a world before Edison, Thomas of yore and Con of late. Though my freezer contains only Hendrick's gin and ice cubes, once you see (and smell) what it means to run afoul of the power company it's hard to get the experience out of your mind. Not to mention the fact that I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I only owed $134.45 for six months of electricity. To me that seemed quite reasonable. I had charged my laptop and iPhone, used the blender, kept the ice cubes solid, blasted music and read by electric lamplight each night all for less than $25 a month. A bottle of Hendrick's doesn't last that long and costs $30, and it doesn't light the bulbs or charge the laptop. Though to be fair, Hendrick's does other things for humanity, even if it's no electric sun.
In order to pay the electric bill, I had to call Con Ed. After my nineteen-minute hold time due to larger-than-average call volume, I spoke with a fairly knowledgeable and pleasant customer service representative who offered me several extra services I politely declined.
"Do you or anyone in your home use life-support machines?" asked the customer service representative. "If you do, Con Edison will provide you with special services in the event of a storm or power outtage."
"No," I told the customer service representative. "I'm still running under my own power."
I have a tendency to over-disclose to anonymous customer service representatives once we are embroiled in the intimacy of our transaction, especially if the hold time was long and the arrival of the live voice on the line was long-awaited and for some time disbelieved. I continued. "I mean, I will be thirty in the fall, but so far I'm still breathing on my own. If the power goes out, I will go on. I do not require any special services of Con Edison to stay alive at this juncture."
And I felt really good about this! It's been a rough road of late for all the usual reasons--broken heart, financial ruin, artistic despair, existential nausea, feeling alienated from my wardrobe, etc., etc., etc--all in the last fiscal quarter. But tonight, telling the Con Edison customer service representative that I am still operating under my own power, I felt a sense of hope and self-sufficiency. If the power goes out I will go on. I will not rot like steak, for my meat lives. Let Con Ed shut off the power! I will still have impulses! I will still have charge! Let them charge me all they want, for I charge myself! I plug in nowhere! I have power everywhere! I am my own backup generator!
"You know," I told the Con Edison service representative, "I haven't been feeling too good about things lately. But you really put it in perspective for me. I may dwell in darkness, but I have not yet lost power. I'm really glad we talked. I can't thank you enough."
"All right ma'am," she said. "You have a very nice day."
This Being the MySpace Page of Marcus Junius Brutus
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
-Ecclesiastes 1:9
Brutus bought it last night. When it sunk in that he'd been defeated at Philippi by the combined forces of Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar he grabbed a sword and marched down the hill, snapping the ties on his breastplate. By the time he reached the enemy army on the field below he was defenseless. He kissed his father's ring and waded into the sea of soldiers, provoking them to stab him to death, just as Caesar had been.
The swords made a horrible squishing noise, wet and crunchy at the same time. Four of them went clean through Brutus before he collapsed to the ground in the fetal position and the camera floated up birds-eye as the mob closed in.
It was incredibly realistic, though historically inaccurate. In ancient Rome, Brutus actually took his own life several weeks after the Battle of Phillipi. But in "Rome," the HBO Original Series, he dies on the battlefield. More poetic that way.
*
Once again transfixed to the point of dissolution with HBO Original Series programming, I am seized by a fever, a Caesar fever. One moment I was looking for some distracting entertainment, and the next thing I knew I was up all night studying military diagrams of the ancient world.
"Rome" has awakened in me an interest in ancient history that had lain dormant since the Greek mythology class I took freshman year of college, in which I found myself most absorbed not by the professor or the material but the sign-language interpreter the university provided for a deaf student in the class. Better than reading or hearing the myths was watching the interpreter act them out, and by the end of the semester my classmates and I had learned the signs for "sword," "battle," "rape," "kill," "god," "death," and "thunderbolt." Better still than watching Greek myths translated into sign language is watching the civil wars of the late Roman Republic brought to life on the largest film set ever built.
At some point in my immersion in "Rome," the HBO/BBC original series, I realized I was asking more of it than twenty-two hours of lurid entertainment. I was asking that HBO and the BBC's $100 million efforts in the field of set design and prop accuracy convey me to another time and place where I might free myself of being me, here, now.
Just what I am hoping to gain from my spectatorial travels I am not quite sure. Assurance that nothing is new under the sun, and my problems are as old as humanity itself? Relief at being born into this time and this place, where it is fortunate that people of my particular description are recognized as human and allowed to live safely and freely, if angstily? Escape from angst into gratuitous sex and violence? Evidence that sex and violence are all there are? People kill each other and fuck each other and fuck each other over and it all goes on and on? Or maybe it is not ideas I'm in search of but a story that's properly told, in which it all hangs together, however tenuously, in which people move like arrows toward their destinies, triumph gloriously or fail spectacularly, seize important moments or recognize when it's all over and bravely disembowel themselves?
Oddly, I am looking for suspense in stories to which the endings have long been written. The major characters on Rome hurtle towards ends that have been definitively known for over 2,000 years. Now that I've been on the interwebs, I know that Antony and Cleopatra will fight Octavian, lose and commit suicide. (Though I was ignorant enough of ancient history to scowl "Spoiler!" when I first encountered this information one frenzied night of Wikipedia clicking. I had Cleopatra confused with Lady Godiva, and kept waiting for the naked horseback ride.) I knew Caesar would get it and Brutus would do it. There was no suspense in how it would end, only in the pure conjecture of what the characters would say and do in each moment of their doomed and decadent lives.
There is an unfortunate gap between "Rome" and Rome. "Rome" is thrilling, but ancient history is very boring. There are no pictures and no YouTube videos of these events, only re-creations of varying degrees of accuracy and believability. The stories themselves are unsubstantiated. Maybe he killed himself. Maybe he didn't. Maybe his wife killed herself when she heard. Maybe it was the other way around. A letter was found, but it could have been forged. He went by seven different names, but everyone had the same seven names. Maybe he killed himself, or maybe he killed some other guy with the same name. Or maybe two guys with the same name had a drink. Either they had a drink, or they killed each other, or they were lovers, or they were the same person, or they never existed.
In ancient times you had to be famous to even be mis-remembered. You had to command an army of thousands. You had to be eulogized by blind poets. You had to get into Plutarch's Lives. You had to keep copious diaries of your military campaigns and hope they weren't lost. After all that, the best you could hope for would be the half-truths of the few surviving fragments, themselves hearsay, and a marble statue likely to be missing a nose or a limb.
The records of the few figures who were well-documented are dry and unsatisfying. I find I don't want military diagrams, or droning lists of accomplishments, the hithers and thithers, marriages and divorces, alliances and enimities. When depicted in full color and surround-sound these with ample sex and violence these events are enthralling, but when wheeled off like a laundry list, quite boring.
I have been spoiled by our age to delight in the small details, not the big facts. History is by necessity heavy on begetting and last words, the stuff carved on the cheat sheets of tombstones. And history even argues with itself on those simple facts. Birth and death are all very good, but I've become accustomed to a wealth of information on the time in between.
And so in my fascination with the lives of the Romans on the cusp of year zero, I look for the sort of record we're all so blithely making of ourselves--the constant updates of Facebook and Twitter, the tags of Flickr, the Google-able life of the early third millennium. (What will they call this period? The Late American Republic? The Early American Republic? The Middle American Republic? How can we know how to live when we don't even know if we're in the beginning, the middle or the end?)
My entire social cohort lives in the instantaneous nostalgia of our shared internet photo albums. These contain memories not of the orange-y brown days of the seventies and eighties but of last night, last week, last year. I've come to find it comforting that my own life is being sufficiently archived in word and image. By midday tomorrow the pictures of tonight will be uploaded and tagged, revealing what I drank and who I hugged. And just this afternoon someone I knew from sleepaway camp posted one hundred pictures of the 1990s. The album of myself thickens even with no effort on my part. The only challenge is to remain upright in the face of tsunamis of nostalgia, and to grow accustomed to a life of publicity without true fame.
The constantly-documented present instantaneously becomes past, and the past remains incongruously present. I've come to accept and in some way even thrive on the thrice daily updates on the activities of people I haven't seen in five or ten years. In this way, even the ancient history of my own short life is neither history nor buried. The people I went to camp and high school with are "eating the best hot dog right now" or "loving Paris" or "watching this video." We are in public even as we are in private, and the format of Facebook and Twitter status updates deploys the state-of-being verb in the present tense. Even statuses not updated for weeks or months remain immediate: Emily is. We have blurred the line between past and present, public and private, fame and obscurity. Moments I don't even remember are out there forever, and yet I don't have to wait for any blind poet to tell my story, or any sculptor can make me look pretty, or mysterious, or badass or silly. Somehow we've come to have both more and less control over our mildly public images. The internet keeps no secrets but allows the pleb his propaganda.
It was not enough to read the timelines of the lives of famous Romans (and Greeks and Macedonians). It was not enough to see them brought to life by recognizeable actors. I did not want to see Alexander portrayed by Colin Farrell or Achilles portrayed by Brad Pitt. I came to realize that I was not seeking Brutus's life as told by Plutarch, but Brutus's life as told by Brutus. I Googled and Googled, finding a lack of that which is so abundant now--the life of the individual told in his own words. We are all writing our autobiographies sentence by sentence, with our thumbs. Thought it seems primitive it is also fitting that the thumb is the writing instrument of choice in the age of iPhone and Blackberry. The opposeable thumb, after all, is what makes us human. (See "Rome," Season 1, Episode 5: When Titus Pullo tortures and murders Evander for the crime of committing adultery and fathering an illegitimate child with the wife of his best friend, he cuts off the man's thumbs and throws him into the Cloaca Maxima.)
Plutarch had the clever idea to tell the stories of important Greeks and Romans in pairs, side by side, but Facebook and MySpace have outdone him. We live not in pairs but in webs, lists of hundreds or thousands of people who know us or knew us or don't know us. Instead of being tortured, bound or gagged, we are searched, viewed and tagged.
Some friends and I were discussing the combined oddity and nicety of Facebook. The compulsion to "friend" is so powerful that among the little trading-card heads of friends one inevitably collects one's old boyfriends and even people one's randomly slept with. Some of these are legitimate friends, others odd blasts from the past. But into the pile they go, neatly alphabetized and often incongruously listed next to a cousin or a co-worker. One friend remarked that she had recently been "poked" by her freshman-year boyfriend, the one who took her virginity. Unwilling to let the opportunity to make a crude joke pass me by, I said, "That's not the only way he poked you!" But as I looked around the room I realized that everyone with a Facebook account was friends with her first. By keeping in touch we were keeping a record of things. And into the annals of history it goes: He poked me.
*
Compared to the startling accuracy of the internet, misinformation on Brutus abounds. In "Rome" they have him die in de facto suicide on the battlefield at Phillipi, in the ABC series "Empire" he is denied the pleasure of martyrdom, gets exiled and returns disgraced. Caesar didn't say, "Et tu, Brute?" when Brutus stabbed him. Some say his last words were, "Kai su, teknon?" which is Greek for, "You, too, my child?" He didn't say it to reproach Brutus for betraying him, he said it to mean that Brutus too would have a taste of power, or that Brutus too would die by the dagger. But according to Plutarch his last words were, ""By all means must we fly; not with our feet, however, but with our hands." His last words according the Rome: The HBO/BBC drama were, "Tell my mother...something suitable." Mark Antony wrapped him in his finest cloak, says Plutarch. Mark Antony wanted his head packed in salt to brandish in Rome, says HBO. Who to believe? In the end, the man is just a myth, a name to activate and animate in any number of plots. We may never have the opportunity to become the victim of confused and conflicting stories of glory and failure; we've compounded too many facts to leave room for any of the sort of speculation that leads to lofty poetry. But on the other hand we won't be taking any chances on dying in obscurity just because we didn't take it upon ourselves to assassinate Julius Caesar. We don't have to do anything to ensure an archive of ourselves besides click "Create Account."
If there is no Facebook page for the ancient Romans, there is at least a Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia entry on Marcus Junius Brutus led to the MySpace page for Tobias Menzies, the actor who played Brutus. There is much more information available about Tobias Menzies, the actor who played Brutus, than there is about Brutus himself. Tobias Menzies briefly dated Kristin Scott Thomas. Tobias Menzies recently read Heart of Darkness. Tobias Menzies enjoys walking and sitting in cafes. These are the things I wished to know about the people of ancient Rome, but this information is not available in Plutarch's Lives. I wanted to know what Brutus thought, and what Brutus liked, what Brutus said not on his deathbead but in passing. Brutus is...nervous about his conspiracy? Brutus is...not shaving much since he went into exile?
Since I could not know these things about Brutus I friended Tobias Menzies instead. I also enjoy walking and sitting in cafes. It is better than honor suicide after lost battles, better than being run through with four swords, and none of it even being true.
It's a beautiful day for senseless ranting and pointless grudges against the long-forgotten crimes of all the big three: gentification, the government and work.
It continually surprises me that it continually surprises anyone that politicians screw whores. Or, for that matter, that they screw interns, movie stars, other men's wives, their secretaries, their daughters' friends, the women they meet at parties or the men they meet in public restrooms. They always have. They always will. Surely the jaded American public must know this. Surely this is not news, but old news.
It's a tired piece of political theater, the public shaming, the long-faced wife, the under-bitten mask of lip-curled confession. "I have disappointed the standard I set for myself," they say. "I am a gay American."
Then comes the promise. "I will seek help." "I will definitely talk to my minister about this, this rampant fucking of women or men who are not my wife."
The question is not "Why do they" or "where do they?" or "how do they?" though in the aftermath of these revelations always comes the compulsive and pornographic re-telling of the affair in the interest of the public good. One of the true cornerstones of America is the national obsession with sexual shame, and the shame of sex. The question is: "Why do we continue to care about the sexual transgressions of our politicians when they are among the most minor of their crimes?"
Yes, it's ironic and hypocritical that Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings and then patronized one himself. Yes, it's maddening that the people who supposedly make and enforce the laws break them at just as a high a rate as the people they govern. But if there's any truth to be uncovered in this--or any--political sex scandal, it's not what, exactly, Spitzer wanted to do that wasn't "safe" or what made him a "difficult" customer or whether he used a few grand he raised pressing flesh to get his flesh pressed. It's that we are such weak creatures, so easily lured by the lurid, that we only really get it up for the dirty details, and it's too boring and too depressing to care or even think about what else politicians might be doing behind closed doors, with their pants firmly belted and their flies summarily zipped. The rooms in which we should be prying are those in which transgressions occur that might actually affect us in some vague way. At the moment he is engaged in the act of coitus or fellatio or light bondage, the politician is actually least dangerous to the citizen, for at that moment (unless he is truly kinky) he is not selling his soul (nor ours) but pleasuring his body.
"But," everyone murmurs, "if he used taxpayer dollars..." If political officials used taxpayer dollars exclusively to get laid, the world would be a better place. There are desires more destructive than the average public servant's bootlicking masochism, or whatever the middle-aged lawyers are into these days. The desire to, say, bomb an entire country into oblivion and then pay Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root and Blackwater billions of dollars to police and rebuild it is more depraved, one could argue, than sex.
Political officials use taxpayer dollars to fund needless wars. The government of New York State uses taxpayer dollars to enforce the Rockefeller laws and execute people. If the government spent more of my money on hookers I'd be grateful.
Yeah yeah, the water--potably polluted, yeah yeah, the highways--jammed with traffic, fouling the environment, yeah yeah, the schools--teaching lies, breaking spirits, yeah yeah, the trains--ill-maintained, books cooked, never on time, fares meteorically rising. But still. Someone is doing something. I know, I know, without someone doing something there'd be murder in the streets. Everyone would be a solider. Imagine that, soldiers and killing, right here, in America, instead of everywhere else!
There are two ways to look at the government. One is that they are incompetent, moronic bureaucrats and thieves, but their work is so boring and their lives so full of shit that we should be glad it's them doing it and not us. The other is that they are evil geniuses who use the claim of providing us with clean water and effective sewage systems to oppress us. But either way, whether they are public servants or outright crooks (and isn't every government and every individual official in it a mixture of the two), one thing I am certain of is that it doesn't matter who fellates them while they go about the simultaneous business of committing their crimes and doing their thankless jobs.
I get the sense that in places like France, it is tacitly understood that politicians, or rather just men, or rather just people, stray from their primary relationships, and it is handled delicately, without hysteria or outcry. It is handled with the nihilism that suits France, or at least French cinema. But here in America it is the taste for violence that is handled with kid gloves. We're quick to call our politicians cheaters or perverts but much slower to call them murderers or criminals. That would be disrespectful to the office. It seems that the quickest way for a politician to disrespect his own office and end his tenure is not to defy the constitutional laws he is swore to enforce, but the marital laws he vowed to keep.
Daniel Ellsberg came to speak at my college just after Lewinskygate broke. He was a man who cared enough to expose the war crimes of his government rather than the details of their sex lives. He pointed out that Clinton had been steadily bombing Iraq throughout his administration, and yet the nation was currently far more absorbed by the news that Clinton and his young consort had used a cigar as a sex toy. (Was ever a more Freudian object passed between sex partners a generation apart?)
"The American people," said Ellsberg, "should be more concerned with where Mr. Clinton puts his bombs than where he puts his cigars."
I am not disillusioned because men cheat, or women cheat, or people cheat, or politicians cheat. The human animal is naturally devious and the heart is deceitful above all things. I am disillusioned because rather than concern themselves with the failure of the ideal that affects all of us--that oft-bandied word, "democracy," the public continually harps upon the lie whose consequences only truly affect a relative few, two to be exact--that even older myth, monogamy.
Politicians and governments use the money they raise not only to buy themselves hookers, but to buy themselves bombs and bullets. No matter how depraved a particular head of state might be, politicians don't spend the bulk of their time fucking whores, interns, movie stars, other men's wives, secretaries, friends of their daughters or the women they meet at parties, or men they meet in public restrooms. Politicians spend most of their time meeting with people far more powerful than the former teenaged runaways/aspiring singers they seduce or pay to fellate or whip them. In those rooms, at those meetings, they authorize executions and they authorize wars. They authorize torture and they ignore warnings. They give out no-bid contracts and waste sums of public money exponentially larger than Spitzer's outstanding balance at the Emperor's Club. They move billions of dollars into secret accounts, they bring misery and suffering and death upon thousands of people with a single signature. They are all such fuckers, but it has nothing to do with who they fuck. They may fuck Kristin or Monica or Marilyn Monroe, but in the end it's us they fuck, and they fuck us all.
The L train is doing that thing where it glides very slowly and silently under the river in slow-motion. There is no noise coming from the tracks; at this speed the wheels don't clatter and the machinery doesn't rattle. There's just that low whine as the weird stuff on the walls of the tunnels slips by, signals and then reflectors and striped bits of plastic, arcane technical markings and bursts of lurid graffiti then the odd glimpse of some passageway that looks like it belongs in Lord of the Rings, or something lower-budget involving quaint parallel universes.
The woman next to me is reading that morning's free paper, an article about the development in Williamsburg.
"Williamsburg is over," she announces to no one.
"You live there, don't you?" she now addresses me specifically. She wearing pounds of makeup, cohered into a unified object.
"Well," she says. "What do you think?"
"I think it sucks," I say. I don't say: I think it should be BLOWN UP, because you're not supposed to say that, especially on the subway. If you say something, see something! I don't say: You know how at the end of Fight Club, all those empty glass office towers go down in a kind of beautiful controlled demolition? I think they should do that. Though that would be bad for the neighborhood, too. It would cake the neighborhood in a layer of toxic dust for several years, tiny shards of all the glass and stainless steel awaiting the yuppies' arrival hanging in the air and the DOH and the DEP and the EPA slow to tell us it's killing us.
The empty condos, rising so fast and high, who will live in them and where are those people now? This coming invasion, where is it massing? And if it can't be stopped, can it at least be organized? I want marching. I want lockstep. Goosestep, even. I want them to make it official. When the remaining yuppies come to take over Williamsburg for good--not the first two decades worth of decreasingly brave settlers but the final hordes who will constitute the full success of the Brooklyn lebensraum--when they come for real I want them to unfurl their banner, I want to see the strength of their numbers, I want to hear it reverberating in their canyons of glass. How come they never make a ceremony of those momentous events? Why can't we have an ending, why must we realize the ending happened at some indiscernible moment long ago, or maybe the ending happened before we got there, maybe it was over before it began?
"Whaddya gonna do?" I say to the woman. So much makeup. Does she sleep in it? Why are all broken things slathered in cheap paint? Why must everything old be shellacked or glazed instead of permitted to fall into beautiful ruin?
The train, inexplicably, picks up speed. They never say anything about these delays. They never say, "ladies and gentlemen, it's going to be a fucking slow ride." They never say, "ladies and gentlemen, Williamsburg is over."
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