...more recent posts
August 29, 2001
A letter from my father:
“Mature Summer has arrived, a sense—almost—of youth departed. Now we slide down towards September. I am more acutely aware of the passing seasons as I get older. More acutely aware, too, of the passage of time. Perhaps like some bird species we should reverse continents, exchange one hemisphere for another. Arrive in Australia for Spring! Love from Dad.
The proclivity for purple prose, his obsession with the seasons (note capitalization), the reminder of his chronic SAD (seasonally affected disorder)—the DNA, it will get you in the end as well as the beginning. But beyond the juvenile reaction to one’s own blood, it seems like a pretty good idea: Australia for winter.
Unbeknownst to him I had spent some hours surfing—surfing seems too elegant a term for what is involved in the search for information with my computer and modem—staggering about the web, regarding light therapy devices. For about $300 it appears that you might be able to convince yourself that you are in Australia for the winter by staring at a special lamp for half an hour every morning. The hope being that the attendant winter mood troughs can be avoided. Sounds like a bargain.
August 23, 2001
Sometimes I wonder about Jim Nightingale. I wondered about him last night at a party full of oenophiles. I’m sure Jim Nightingale drank beer. Jim Nightingale was the most exotic thing that ever walked up Gray’s Lane. Jim Nightingale lived three houses up. He was married to Ida Kohn, the daughter of Ziggy Kohn who sold Singer sewing machines. None of these people were Irish, which was, in the Ireland of 1970, a remarkable thing. Jim Nightingale was dodging the draft. He fixed your household appliances if they happened to be manufactured by Novum. Jim Nightingale was the Novum man. There must have been a lot of Irish housewives—they were still housewives then—who were very glad that they had purchased a Novum appliance and that it had subsequently malfunctioned. We didn’t have any Novum appliances. But on a regular basis Jim Nightingale would post two tubes of Trebor Sherbet through our letter box, one for my mother and one for me. Trebor Sherbet was a delicious concoction. It consisted of a cylindrical cardboard tube wrapped in faded yellow paper with weak red type. The contents were a white, fizzy powder. From the twisted top of the cylinder poked a black licorice tube that you could bite the top off and suck the sherbet through. I thought my mother ancient, beyond such things, but once, when Jim Nightingale put ice cubes in her wellington boots that she had taken off during a visit to his house, I saw her blush and giggle in a way I thought foreign to my mother. Jim Nightingale moved to Canada and eventually disappeared. When I was fifteen he sent me a photo of himself in an outdoor shower in the wilds of British Columbia, head, torso, and lower legs emerging from the wooden structure. Soon I will be the age my mother was when Jim Nightingale put ice cubes in her wellington boots.
August 21, 2001
One of the advantages of being abandoned by your spouse in a steaming parked van is that you are forced to take in your environment. He had gone into the Rite Aid on Clinton and Grand streets to redeem coupons for an $11.99 three pack of Mach III razors. There’s something about the mere sight of shopping coupons that elicits emotions that I’m not proud of, disdain, impatience, anxiety. Nevertheless, we both have bits we like to shave, him since he shed his beard, me since I can no longer take the rantings of the Eastern European waxing women (my last regular just exiled her teenage son back to Roumania for being insolent to her; just think what she could do with a tub of hot wax). So I was secretly delighted that he was buying fresh razors. The light was leaving the sky and I noticed the Empire State building from a new angle. I am proprietary about the Empire State Building having worked on the 27th floor for close to ten years. It was a terrible place to work. But if you look up towards the top at a certain hour of the day, to the viewing platform—even from the distance of Grand Street—you can see the light bursts of tourist’s cameras flashing into the late summer twilight air. They were out of Mach III razors and the offer ends tonight. The cashier issued him with a “rain check coupon” so he could come back and get the $11.99 deal at a later date. Now I would never have thought to ask.
August 19, 2001
I’ve always liked that bit near the start of “The Sheltering Sky:”
“Port said: ‘I had a strange dream yesterday. I’ve been trying to remember it, and just this minute I did.’
‘No!’ cried Kit with force. ‘Dreams are so dull! Please!’
‘You don’t want to hear it!’ he laughed. ‘But I’m going to tell you anyway.’ The last was said with a certain ferocity which on the surface appeared feigned, but as Kit looked at him she felt that on the contrary he actually was dissimulating the violence he felt. She did not say the withering things that were on the tip of her tongue.
‘I’ll be quick about it,’ he smiled. ‘I know you’re doing me a favor by listening, but I can’t remember it just thinking about it...’
Kit closed her eyes unhappily.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.
‘I think it’s extremely thoughtless and egotistical of you to insist this way when you know how boring it is for us.’”
The scene ends in tears, Kit’s. I’ve always been on Kit’s side in this matter. Nevertheless, I liked this one that I had last night, and it’s far from the grand, sad premonition of Port’s dream about starting life over again but not being able to. Mine was just a sex/guilt/bureaucracy dream.
I am leaving my sweet but dull cousin off at JFK. I have brought a huge duffel bag even though I am going nowhere. There’s a smattering of Nelsons in the departure lounge. My cousin leaves. A tall handsome Australian approaches, dressed in motorcycle gear but not the smelly leather of Mad Max. He is wearing the latest Balenciaga for fall, a sort of recherché, lightweight version of the real thing. We start to talk and somebody steals my bag. The loss is ameliorated by the opportunity to get on the back of Mod Max’s bike. We disappear for a few days. Eventually he has to leave as all sexual knights do, the quest is ongoing. Now I am concerned about my bag. Apart from the $500 cash, it contained all of my most precious belongings. I go to the lost property people, an army of faceless, green-uniformed women. Yes they have my bag. Some stuff may be gone but most appears to be still there. No I can’t have it. I can look at it but I can never retrieve it. I threaten them with the law. But this is the law.
August 18, 2001
It’s so reassuring to be reassured. One of the most reassuring things one can do on a Friday summer night in Manhattan, when you have been left behind on the island with all the others who haven’t gone to places with more verdure or ocean or both, is to take yourself to the back of the Corner Bistro and have a burger with fries. It was soothing after an evening that seemed to be intent on presenting Manhattan in horror mode. A homeless man wheeling his supermarket trolley, suitcase to his life, had something hanging over his shoulder or hugging his neck. As I looked again it appeared to be a child, the legs dangling down his chest, the head facing downward over his shoulder. Or was it a chimpanzee dressed in a baseball outfit? Whatever it was it was not living. The teenage girls at the front of the bus, all three with cell phones and braces, are staring too. As the bus slows for a stop I can look again: perhaps he has fashioned this dead humanoid leech out of stuffed items of clothing.
The beautiful one-legged woman in the shower at the gym, fresh from the pool, lopsided mermaid.
The homeless man begging through a cab window with a hand that has had all of its digits ripped off.
And I can go and have a burger and be reassured? Shameful but true.