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October 10, 2001
I’ve been meaning to leave New York for so long that it’s become one of those comforting embarrassments that you carry around like a stuffed animal way past the developmental sell by date. I’ve been meaning to leave New York for fifteen years; I had intended to stay for a year. The vanity of plans in a city of such seductive powers. My friend C. is a producer by profession and as with many talented and successful people her professional skills are often evident in her personal life. While I was slowly maneuvering around the idea of terrorist attacks acting as a catalyst to pry me out of the city she was in a car scouting the North Fork for houses. Before a considerable portion of the populous had settled on flight as an appropriate response, she had managed to procure a house, at what seems a ridiculously nominal rent, with four bed rooms, a fire place and a kitchen in which you can imagine performing endless, complicated and deeply satisfying culinary rituals. Her rationale in renting the house was not to escape the fear of terrorism, it was to “cheer us up.” Producers are often in charge of morale.
I’m not sure how one would make a living out there—a job at the Cutchogue McDonalds—so weekly stints in the city are still required. But I find myself wondering why I have prolonged the wearing of such an ill fitting shoe—permanent residency in Manhattan—for so long. “If in doubt, run away,” has frequently served as my motto. Economic necessity, moral paralysis? That part of a life that grows up around you in a city as you get older: a lover, friends, the unfounded conviction that you have to persist with your role as an extra in the drama of a great metropolis? Medical needs, the ability to get a shrimp stuffed squid at 10.25pm on a Monday night? I think I’m ready to relinquish them all, presuming that the lover and friends will visit. Especially when I think of the shed in the garden that M. sat in on Sunday working at her laptop. Returning from my bike ride I looked at her through the window and thought that there are few visions as pleasing as watching someone enjoy their work undisturbed. She emerged amazed at how much work she had done.
The house is ours only until May, but I suspect that this venture that C. so beautifully produced in her producer way—with certainty, without misgivings (though she might argue otherwise), and with a deep conviction of the possibility of outcomes that parallel and exceed dreams—has finally broken the seal of my self-siege in Manhattan. I’ve been crying wolf for so long with regard to city departure and finally there’s a train in the station that permits, even encourages, those that have been hallucinating wolves for years to board.
October 9, 2001
The potato boiling authoress’ book party reminded me of something that I had forgotten about her. She is one of many good looking sisters. A many sibling’d splendor. Her closely shared DNA can be found orbiting about her in many permutations. In a room she and her family are their own galaxy. One sister is present at the party with two of her own offspring; two girls stamped in their familiar gene foundry. The leit motif of feature, a varied palette of eyes and hair, but all with the echo of their own blood. Displaying that ability some families have of apparently subsuming the other half of the genes: “look no daddy, we cloned them.” Celebrating the way that a large family derives a degree of buoyancy from its own mass, creating a mythology out of its members.
I once had a roommate with a similarly large, predominantly female family. There were six sisters. I couldn’t keep the sisters names or the various strains of their soap operatic lives straight in my head. I was drowning in sisters, apparently I was living not with one sister but with all of them. Such proliferation of life both fascinated and repelled me. My own family always felt like a drifting triangle, winding down, two-stepping with entropy. Being without siblings, without offspring, and at the end of a series of small, withering families perhaps I merely console myself with this theory out of cold necessity, but somehow it has always felt like a suitable arrangement to me. I harbor a perverse pleasure in the fact that we are dying out. Relieved that the tribe is ready to relinquish its double helix at the gates of extinction. Prepared to revel in the ecstasy of dénouement, the accelerated pleasure of ending. To clock out from the factory of evolution. A delicious blasphemy.
A friend’s grandmother used to say on bringing her and her siblings to one of the vast Irish beaches and finding other humans present on it, even two or three, “Eugh, people....” She would turn on her heels, dragging the army of small children she had custody of for the day and seek out another beach. Fortunately for all involved it is not impossible to find an Irish beach empty of people. There she was with her tribe, gregarious with her own flock but not willing to descend onto the planes to mingle with the great soup of humanity. I have missed out on this grandmother’s conviction that one’s own are more than merely “people”, and on the pleasure she derived from being surrounded by the delicious infinity of variation she witnessed in her family, that which rendered her extended family simultaneously transparent and acutely visible to her.
I was looking down at the beach delighted that there were people there, people that looked very different from my own tribe; I went and joined them.
October 4, 2001
An invitation to a book party. The author, a friend unseen for years from college who resides in Ireland, has written a children’s book being published in the US. When I first lived here, in a self-made Irish ghetto on Flatbush Avenue Extension, she came to stay in what we referred to as nightmare dormitory. Whether it was a long standing thing or something that developed in the close quarters of the walk through apartment I don’t know, but she developed a passion for one of the permanent occupants, another friend from college. She would get up very early, before the staggered stagger to the bathroom, and boil potatoes. The potatoes were intended for the loved one’s breakfast. They would sit dry and floury in a pot waiting for him to arise and for her to fry them to perfection. Her attentions, particularly the potato boiling, irritated him. Living six to an apartment, boiling potatoes, drinking whisky. It would be a play to avoid on, even off, Broadway. Somebody I had developed a similarly misguided crush on once made a remark about the potato boiling authoress. It must have been spring or summer as she wore a series of slightly anachronistic cotton dresses that all featured a cut out triangle on the upper part of her back. He asked, “Where does she keep all of the triangles?” It endeared him to me even further. These things and her good skin came to mind when the invitation arrived.
October 3, 2001
I’ve been wondering what the nation has been dreaming of late. It’s probably not the time to commence taking a medication with the documented side-effect of “vivid dreams and nightmares.” But a visit to Dr. Sleaze, who I really think I have to fire, resulted in just this. Ever the pessimist, I have been going to bed expecting to be churned through the subconscious mill with a vengeance. I had heard from fellow patients that Sustiva® rendered horror more colorful and apparently three dimensional than any DVD player. I had even heard that it was being sold as a street drug. Perhaps my lifelong inability to endure a movie with anything stronger than a gremlin in it is paying off. The dreams are vivid but thankfully the horror is absent. They appear to be art directed by Gianni Versace and display a tackiness of subject, costume and color that is more reminiscent of pornography than horror. Last night I was part of a female burglary team. We infiltrated the parties of the rich and famous and in between making inane conversation about oil free moisturizers, sipping champagne, and adjusting our Yves Saint Laurent sandals strapped high on our tanned and well muscled calves, we discreetly pocketed the jewelry and personal effects of the household. All of this was blissfully without guilt or the fear of being apprehended. I awoke with the distinct feeling of a job well done, of finally having found a métier that I relished, and only vague misgivings about my own shallow, not to mention immoral, nature.
September 28, 2001
Today I set out to achieve two things. I failed at both. I had planned to avoid two things. Two situations where I had determined to utilize all my upper body strength to pry the collar of my coat off the smooth bronze nub of the proverbial hook. I had resolved to use deception, pleading and in one instance—if it felt appropriate at the time—a little half earnest bribery. One involved a doctor, the other a friend attempting to herd me into gainful employment. The particulars are not relevant. What is relevant is the failure of my intent and my subsequent relief at that failure. We may not be up to the job, stoic enough for the prescribed poison, but we can be shored up, bullied, and hoisted back up onto our hook. It might even leave us grateful. Permission, once again, to be sentries to ourselves.