pretty dumb things

the stuff of dreams

I made a sound recording of this piece. You can listen to it, or you can read it, or both. Your choice.

The stuff of dreams

 

Last week, I had a sex dream about a friend of mine. It was vivid and delicious, and when I woke to my cat’s mewling and tromping heavy across my head, I struggled to return to it. The details dribbled away faster than I could recall them. Like an Aboriginal sandpainting in a tornado, it flew apart and slipped into cracks, and all I was left with were a few pastel scraps and orts. An improbable coupling on a mattress in the middle of a medieval courtyard. The breath-warm feeling of joy and completeness and pleasure that suffuses good sex. The sense that in fucking, this friend and I had done something wildly irrational, murderously stupid, and ill conceived, and that we had defied the odds.

I often have sex dreams. I rarely have them about friends. Usually I dream about celebrities or ex-boyfriends, people whose private existences are dwarfed in size by the scale of my own projections about them. When I do dream about friends, I wake wrapped in the disconcerting and weird. It’s one thing when I willfully choose to place friends into my onanistic fantasies, when my inner Candida Royale casts them in the porn narrative that plays as I do the voodoo that I do by myself, so well.

It’s another thing entirely when my despotic unconscious usurps that role and suddenly I’m plunged in the throes of hot, hot, dirty friend-on-erogenous zones action. It is, of course, fine in the dark of the night. Everything is entirely natural in a dream. But by the light of day and naked bulb of conscious thought, I find the lingering dream-shred disconcerting. I find myself mildly haunted, the erotic specter of my platonic relationship poking its head out at inopportune moments. Suddenly, the dreamed about is cast in a new and flattering light. My conscious mind gets hijacked. Thoughts wander. It’s weird and discomfiting.

Then there’s the question of whether I tell the friend. Do I or don’t I? Does he or doesn’t he (or, occasionally, she)? Will this confession lead to further weirdness and discomfiting? Or will it lead to some dreamy land of fulfillment? Or will it, as is and should be most often the case, lead to nothing more than a brief flicker of flattered feeling on the part of the dreamee and the not-unpleasurable frisson of shame and revelation on the part of the dreamer?

This time, I did confess—both to the world at large and to the friend in specific. First, I tweeted that I’d had a sex dream about a friend, and then, I emailed my friend and told him that he was the person about whom I’d dreamt. “Feel flattered or, you know, whatever,” I wrote eloquently and not at all ambivalently. He wrote back and, half-jokingly, asked whether in my dream he’d had a big cock. Sadly, that detail is not one of the grains of sand that stuck. I could not give him an accurate answer. I like to make people feel good about themselves when I legitimately can, but I’m hesitant to conjure details when I can’t.

Later in the week, this friend and I had a drink at a bar in Brooklyn. It was a cold night, and sitting at the bar, talking about Sarah Palin’s blood libel and the smell of my cat’s excrement and Twitter and writing and other sundry subjects, we got waylaid by this assertively drunk guy. This guy, bald and sporting hipster eyewear and hipster facial hair and garbed in hipster black, was double fisting red wine and Couvoisier. When the girls to his right left, he swung and turned on us, inserting himself into our conversation like an f-bomb. My friend patiently and deftly redirected the guy. Almost Mr. Miyagi-like, my friend made the guy wax off into the patient Brooklyn dark, and we were left alone to finish our night.

This friend and I, we have a history of unusual candor. It’s good and it’s interesting, and it’s nice to have men in my life upon whom I don’t project white picket fences and the entire Kama Sutra. I’d like it if my unconscious stepped the fuck off that particular stoop and meandered down the way to furnish me a dream about The Situation or Sherrod Brown, someone healthy and positively silver in his ripeness for projection. Sadly, I don’t have the choice, but that is the point of the unconscious. It visits us in the night and lays the mice we’re not expecting at our feet.

Confession has one clear advantage: unbosomed of the secret, I am no longer the sole bearer of it. Priests, therapists, friends, readers: they all play the same role in this. In telling, we are no longer Atlas shouldering the globe, all lonesome alone. We share and in sharing, we lighten the load. My friend, I think he’s cool with it. We laughed and quick-kissed good-bye. He went to his apartment and his dreams, and I to mine, each to his or her own, never the twain to meet, except as we choose.

Or, you know, not.

 

five things 2010 taught me; or celebrities are profound about the darndest things

I learned a few things this past year, and I wanted to write them down, if only to remind myself. We so rarely learn things from other people, unless those other people are The Doctor or Buffy Summers. Or, apparently, Felicia Day.

Five things I learned in 2010:

Pain matters

For most of my life, pain has been a constant, though it has been emotional pain, not physical, as much as one can separate the mind from the body. Three months ago, I had surgery on my rotator cuff, which had hurt for a decade, and which pain I’d learned to live with, much as I learned to live with my depression.

The recovery from the surgery was unbelievably painful. It took about ten weeks before I could sleep through the night—at first I woke up ever hour, then every three hours, then twice a night. For two months, I couldn’t raise my right arm. I couldn’t brush my hair. Everything hurt. And then, slowly, it healed. I can now hail a cab with my right arm, a necessary skill for any Gothamite.

What I learned from this experience is twofold: pain matters and it is not infinite. I have to pay attention to my pain—be it physical or emotional—and I can trust that it’ll get better. But it’ll only get better if I take care of it. Ignoring pain does not make it go away. Ignoring pain makes it stay, and often it makes it get worse. Pain matters, but it doesn’t define me. This has been an important lesson, and I raise my hands in the air that I’ve learned it.

Live authentically

The one thing I’m most proud of in this past year is the sense that improbably, imperceptibly, and incrementally I’ve grown to be more me.  I used to carry about a great weight of remorse about my choices, about living a life that doesn’t conform to cultural expectations, and about having a history marked more by depression and loneliness than joy and connection. The more I’ve accepted who I am and what I’ve done, the more joy and connection I’ve found—and the more joy and connection I’ve found, the more I’ve accepted who I am.

A lot of this change stems from making a brand new circle of friends who are all amazing, strong, creative, glittery and gorgeous women, and none of whom are in the least bit conventional and all of whom are aces with that. They have inspired me more than they know, and it has been an honor to swig whiskey from the bottle with them. Sometimes other people can drag you closer to being who you are. Wacky, that.

I am and am not entitled

I, like you, deserve the rights afforded to every human under the Constitution. I, like you, however, am not entitled to have the job of my dreams, a beautiful and healthy body, lots of caring friends, and a robust intellectual life—unless I (or you) work at it. If I put the work into my profession, my body, my relationships, and my mind, then I absolutely motherfucking deserve everything that comes my way. In fact, I’m entitled to it.

Our culture talks a lot about entitlement as a negative, but it’s also a reasonable expectation, a glory, and benefit of work. If you do the work, regularly, honestly and diligently, you are entitled to everything good that comes from those hours you spend working (the hard truth is that you may still not get it--life fails to be fair, even to the hardworking). If you don’t work, you’re not entitled. You may be lucky and get the fat goods anyway, but the chances are so low as to be infinitesimal. But if I do the work and something good comes my way, fuck yeah, bitches. I’m entitled. Rawr.

Let it go

I learned this lesson from Twitter, where I follow only 99 people, while I have 1,102 followers. If I take on a new follower, I axe someone. I’ll follow only 99 people.

In part, I follow only 99 people because it’s a cool number and I’m not above pretension. But the real reason is that it’s the number of people whose tweets to which I can commit. I’m not going to follow more and not read their tweets. Unless it’s a really busy day or I’m away from my computer or iPhone, I read every tweet from all of my followers (and those who respond to me but whom I don’t follow). I often click and follow links. I regularly look at Twitpics. More than 99, and I’m overwhelmed; fewer than 99 and I’m bereft.

Which is a pretty good way to think about limits in general. We all need limits. Limits keep us safe and happy. Too much room and we’re lost little bunnies, too little and we’re starved. As adults, we choose our own adventures, however tame those adventures may be. It can be difficult to decide what you want from the grand buffet of life, but choose you must. You can’t carry everything, nor should you. As painful as it may be to make a choice, you must make that choice. You may like something, but you may still find you’ve got to let it go. You may find that something isn’t good for you, and you’ve got to let it go. You may love it; you may hate it; you may be bored by it; you may think you need it; you may be hurt by it. When there isn’t room, you’ve just got to let it go.  Make a choice, and let the unchosen go.

Everything happens

Being depressed is a lot about feeling stuck. It’s a lot about feeling that your life doesn’t change, that you just spin your wheels in the much and the dreck and you’re just so tired. The thing is, however, that change happens. However paradoxical, it’s an immutable fact that everything changes. I’m not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason—there’s much in this world that’s entirely random and meaningless, and I’m grateful for that—but everything does happen.

Everything does not, however, happen as you plan, or necessarily as you want, but happen it will. The more work you put into things happening, the better the chance is that what will happen will somewhat conform to your hopes and dreams, but that’s not a given. Only that things change is a given.

When I started this blog in March 2005, I didn’t have expectations. I just wanted to build a better blog than the guy who dumped me. I succeeded at that, but I got a whole lot more. I got noticed, and I got published. I also got an email on New Year’s Eve 2007 from a man who’d read my writing and wanted me to write for him as a freelancer. This October, I took a job with his company full-time. In February, I’ll be moving to Italy, where I’ll be spending 8-10 months a year, if all goes according to plan. I’d never expected that at 48 I’d be moving to Europe, learning another language, and writing for a living. But I am. It’s exciting. Everything happens.

 

in praise of the cocktail hour

I’ve been experiencing prolonged nostalgia for a repressed age in America: the 1950s. The age of the Cold War, Joe DiMaggio, Abstract Expressionism, Joe McCarthy, girdles and Buddy Holly, the 1950s were also the golden age of the cocktail hour. Ah, the cocktail hour, that metonymic moment when adults shuffled children to their beds and were thus given free rein to enjoy Old Fashioneds and Side Cars, smoke cigarettes, snap their fingers to cool Jazz and generally be adults. Little marks the difference between adult and child like the cocktail hour, and little embodies the erosion of the privileges of adulthood like the gradual disappearance of that golden hour.

I'd like a date: or je voudrais fixer une salade d'épinards

If by “date” you mean a social appointment with an individual with whom there is a shared interest in potentially pursuing an amorous relationship, I’ve not had one in over a year. In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen my X, Donny, a fistful of times, and while those times could fall under the heading of “social appointment,” they didn’t quite meet the rest of the criteria. They were more like social appointments of two individuals between whom there is a shared interest in disengagement.

I have also had quasi-hook-ups with two men. One happened last April with a man who is both in a committed, if elastic, marriage and lives many, many thousand miles away from me. The other took place last August with a man far too young to be taken seriously. While I’ve written about the first hook-up, I’ve chosen not to write about the second because it was a fiasco of such depressing dimensions that I’d prefer not to relive it. I suppose that I did date-like things with both of these men, but though adult beverages and food were consumed, and though walks were taken, I don’t consider them dates. No future, no date, not to my thinking anyway.

A year and a couple months after becoming single, I suppose I’m ready to start thinking about dating.

again, once more unto the breach, dear friends

Today I sent a brand, spanky new and totally revised book proposal off to my major agent. Thus proving once again that I'm capable of yanking myself up by my pretty little bootstraps at least one more time.

Monday, I start the job at the office, which may be a level in hell for me, but at least I'm going to be working for a known and beloved demon.

So there, wicked and conspiring universe. Up your collective butthole.

break ups and other viscera

I never thought I’d agree with anything that Neil Sedaka ever voiced in song, but in this one respect he is correct: breaking up is hard, so hard, to do.

Having made that stony blanket statement, now let me backtrack a bit. Breaking up, if you’ve fallen out of love, is not hard to do. Then, actually, it is remarkably easy. It’s like ripping a Band-Aid off a cut that’s healed and on a patch of skin without hair. Breaking up with someone with whom you’re now longer in love is, and forgive the extreme visceral metaphor here—and I warn you, it bears a kind of X-Games intestinal intensity—is like taking the perfect shit. When you no longer love someone, dumping that person has a kind of gliding excretory grace. It’s nearly pleasurable. And when it’s over, you clean yourself up a bit and all you feel is relief.

Not so when you break up with someone whom you still love. Then it’s kind of more like those medieval torture devices where they dragged your intestines out and wound them like yarn upon a spit. It’s a long, slow death, from what I’ve read, and you’re likely to pass out from the pain. As rococo as this image is, it’s also the most apt metaphor for what I’ve been enduring with Donny, my X, since last September when he messily told me that in fact, no, he wasn’t ready to marry me.

The upshot of all of this red, gooey gore is that I’m out here on the beach and I did not invite Donny. Rather, I invited a few other friends and a couple of them are joining me. We three girls will undoubtedly pillow fight vigorously while wearing pastel panties and twee tank tops, until we melt into a heap of tanned limbs and Sapphic intent. Actually, we won’t. But you’re free to let that sugarplum image dance in your collective heads if it pleases you.

And yet, even here on this little island with its sand and its chirruping birds and its crashing of the surf and its sun beaming in a charming, non-fatal way, I am enveloped in the emotional aspic that is the lingering break up. Donny, apparitional, haunts my thoughts, and as much as I want to exorcise him, I like him lingering, kind of like the rank, pink smell of flowers so past their prime that they approach the loam readiness of mulch.

I probably need a lover. I vacillate. I masturbate. Mostly, I masticate. Though I’m currently on a bender of beach waddling/wogging, an endeavor that seems to put a gentle kibosh on my cookie eating. I try to think of myself as incorporeal, which is difficult at the beach. There’s just so much skin-ness here. I’m brown as the proverbial beetle. My feet are so tan they look transplanted. I recognize that part of the process of this compulsive sun exposure (with sunscreen) and beach exercise has buried within it the attempt to reunite me with my own flesh. The break up took a physical toll, you see, and for many months I wanted to pretend I simply had no body, now that I had nobody.

It’s probably a good sign that I want to turn Donny into a ghost, that I want him to thaw, melt and resolve into a dew, because for many months I desperately wanted to be the ghost. This break up has been so very painful that I’ve had fantasies of simply vanishing. I’ve wanted to walk the streets invisible. I’ve pondered the glorious obscurity of the burka. I’ve wished that I could be as alone as a ghost, a solo shade flitting about the Hades of Manhattan. I’ve wanted, frankly, to cease to exist, but not, you know, in a permanent kind of way.

Last night I had a dream that I had succeeded, nearly. I dreamt that I’d taken some obscene overdose of Technicolor pills and that said dose had deposited me on death’s door. I felt this intense desire to just, finally, let go. But I didn’t. In my dream, I was revived, and then in a shocking turn of events that really happens most often only dreams, I was with Dustin Hoffman. I was interviewing him. He was looking at me peculiarly, and I explained what had happened with me the previous night: pills, color, desire, drifting, snapping back to life. He was solicitous.

And then he asked, “So I don’t suppose you would consider something casual, like a fling?” I considered it. I demurred. We continued talking, and Dustin morphed into a forty-ish Robert Redford. A while later I woke up.

What I make of all of this is that I’m fumbling through this break up. It’s not been easy because I loved Donny; I loved him enough to choose him as my husband. I remain hurt that he didn’t choose me, and I remain doubly hurt that it’s taken ten months for me to begin to realize that he isn’t the man I thought he was, that we are not in love any longer, and that I am ready to move on.

But something in my gut is telling me to accept all of that all of that gristly truth. Incredibly I’m almost listening.

on sunsets in summer and other wonders

The thing about summer is that with sunset comes a swelling of hushed expectation. This direct correlation between dusk and hope is a peculiarly summery phenomenon; at no other time of year does the setting of the sun create a palpable sense that at any moment, something wonderful might occur.

This feeling was born for me in adolescence. I don’t remember being a kid in summer and at night feeling much more than the physical smoothie of tiredness, happiness and wish that it would be morning. Only the sprouting of strange hairs and even stranger desires made twilight potentially magic. There was, with adolescence, a new and profoundly erotic romance to dusk. It was like I could suddenly feel an entrance to a magical realm where fairies would run amok doing unutterable and mostly unconceivable acts to one another with unabashed joy. Maybe Shakespeare had it right; midsummer makes love-besotted asses of us all.

I’m looking at my life with most likely more than half of it gone. It’s a strange place, this interstitial space between youth and decrepitude. I don’t feel my age; I suppose I don’t look it. In my head, which is where I live most of the time, I oscillate in age. One moment I feel like I did when I was 22, another I’m 13, still another I’ve telescoped to a chronologically appropriate 45. On the inside, I’m like Alice in the drawing room, shooting up and down in interior size, but often without the aid of biscuits or elixirs, though I wouldn’t rule them out.

And yet, however constantly shifting the internal landscape, summertime’s sense of nightfall wonderment lingers. There could be something, it feels, something so astounding I can’t quite make it out sitting there, right there, just beyond, just next to that firefly or that one or the one over there, if only I could be quick enough to grasp it.

There have been a handful of times when the wonderment has been requited. One was at a camp dance with Adam Fell; we met fortuitously and flirted with the white-hot intensity of stars on the verge of supernova. Another singular bunch happened repeatedly with Donny Barber; we would come together under the velvet fall of night, and unspeaking, solder our mouths together; his kisses invariably tasted like tobacco and beer. There was the hot, pulsating night that my seduction of Marta became inevitable. Once, on Summer Solstice, about twenty-five years ago, I met a detestable rich boy who later that night taught me to orgasm during sex; I disliked the boy, but I loved fucking him. Another time, I met a boyfriend at an Oscar Wilde play; dressed in a friend’s white linen suit, my hair plastered to my head, I looked like a boy; we walked home hand-in-hand, and a some guys yelled out anti-gay epithets and we laughed because we could.

More recently, there was the first date with Donny, my X, when we walked the promenade on the Hudson; he told me about the engineering of jet planes, and I watched his pervert’s mouth with avidity. There was another night too, a comedy of errors, early in Donny’s and my dating history, a night of wandering around Riverside park, missing one another by minutes, and a roller skating guy who acted like Hermes and brought a message from me to Donny.

My magic revolves around others; my magic revolves around love. That something glowing and effulgent and corporeal; that something just outside of my fingertips and on those slender occasions when I can touch it, that something so pleasurable it makes me will myself from exploding. All those years later, all this time and all this experience, all those days beginning and ending, all those seasons rolling off one another like words from my tongue, all that everything, and still the crepuscular wonder remains, that hope, that wish, that near dusky touch of something waiting, something astounding.

wish/fear

And then as if to torture me, my unconscious serves up a piping hott sex dream dwelling on Donny’s dexterous fingers. It’s not enough that I spend my waking days repeating an elliptical list of highly rational, extremely persuasive and extraordinarily lucid reasons why I need to move on, post-hastey, but now my unconscious feels the need to prod and poke at the most delicate parts of me as if to remind me as to why I ought not.

It’s less fun, really, and I’m beginning to see the wisdom of the phenomenon of the rebound boy. Regretfully, I also know I’m no longer the kind of woman who can surf the relationship wave, hanging ten and shooting the green hook-up tunnel. I am simply not that flexible. Maybe I need to take up tantric yoga and learn some new relationship asanas. Downward-face double-dating dog, or some such.

Last night’s sex dream, as my sex dreams tend to do, held out the sweet pink promise of orgasm, attenuated it, and then snatched it away. My unconscious is a cruel, perverse mistress, and not in a good way. My sex dreams tend to incorporate people I know, so Donny’s presence, and more to the point the presence of his long and agile fingers, was unsurprising. Nor was the unusual setting—my back up against a wall of unknown origin, my skirts wadded up around my midsection, Donny close as a conspirator, his fingers buried inside me as if he was trying to snitch a lost object from an inconvenient locale. My sex dreams like to present to me a full spectrum of sexual behaviors that in my waking state I’d be hard pressed to find particularly pleasurable. They like to remind me of my conscious limitations.

I can’t help feeling that this dream is part and parcel of my current stage in the Donny-processing process, which is one wedged somewhere between the hard wish and the rocky fear. What precisely those wishes and those fear are, however, remain murky.

Like, for example, when we talk, I become a ventriloquist’s dummy as this horrible voice makes me go all puppet-like as it insists on asking/intimating/insinuating that Donny is dating someone else. I hate this voice, and yet even as I feel its words burble in my mouth, I’m incapable of stopping them. I am momentarily the unwilling acolyte to this horrid Svengali. And after I utter them, these phrases that require Donny’s swift and pointed denial, I feel dissatisfied. Yet I’m not sure what exactly I’m dissatisfied with—Donny’s denial because it wasn’t ardent enough, Donny’s denial because I’d actually like him not to deny, myself for asking in the first place, or something else I’ve not yet ascertained.

I find myself caught between the wish that he’s seeing someone and the fear that he is, or perhaps the wish that he is and the fear that he isn’t, or the wish that he isn’t and the fear that he is, or…bugger it. I can’t help but feel that were Donny to move on, and were I to know it, painful as it was, it would give me the tacit permission to move on my own darn self, and frankly that would be an immense relief. I feel like such a schnook that I can’t extend that permission to myself, but as of yet I can’t.

And here’s the kicker of last night’s erotogenic near-apogee: historically, I have a far harder time moving on from relationships with extra-good sex. Pretty much what keeps me yearning is high-quality fornication. It took me, for example, seven years to fully process my loss of C, the man I loved most and best prior to Donny. I shudder to think how long it will take me to see Donny fully recede in the relationship rearview mirror. On the other hand, lovers less stellar like Eff and Ernie vanished quickly and, like arsenic, left only a bitter trace.

My Xs have a tendency toward coupling unto nesting. All of my serious Xs—C, Eff,  Ernie, even the Goat-Gatherer—hooked up like doilies with someone new within weeks/months of our relationship’s demise. C and Ernie were married (to other people, not to one another, though that image amuses) within a year and a half. I suppose this history too is another complicating factor to my wish/fear surrounding Donny. I more than half expect him to take up with someone else, and quickly. And no small part of me just wearily wishes that he would.

an imprudent proposal

See, here’s the internal conundrum waging noisily as roofers inside my head: do I make an imprudent proposal, or do I not? It’s a question one could almost sing to a Clash song, were one to simplify the syntax.

The essentials of the issue are stark. Next week I am at a vacation house rather surprisingly alone. It’s a lovely little house with all the comforts of home and then some—I, for example, have neither cable nor a washing machine. It’s near the beach. It has a deck and a grill and it’s quiet and quaint and there are roses that bloom assertively. I wasn’t expecting to be spending about five days at this here house by myself, and yet here I am, staring a five-day, beachy solitude in the sandy, sunny face. I’ve asked a bunch of my friends to join me, and for a variety of reasons (mothers visiting, trips to Europe, busted exhaust systems in their vintage automobiles) no one can make it. So faced with spending a solid expanse of time on my onesy, I have been mulling over inviting, yeah, Donny.

My X and I remain in chatty contact. We are both of us tiptoeing precariously on that tightrope between parting forevermore and cleaving together. We chat, and the talk, seemingly light and fluffy as meringue, is thickly pregnant with possibility. It’s not just the sexual innuendoes that come and go like so many erotic birds winging about; it’s the subtext of keening loss and wailing need and the slow, inexorable thrum of love. Neither of us seems set on what we want, and it’s horrible and delightful in equal measure.

I’ve been turning over this idea of Donny spending this free-floating beach-bound time with me for weeks. It’s a concept I’ve considered from all its polyhedal angles. I’ve imagined the best and the worst, but mostly I’ve imagined us fucking. I really, really miss fucking my boyfriend, and I’m having a hard time teasing apart the threads of my emotional desire from those of my purely rank red pussy, to steal a line from Joyce and in doing so paraphrase it poorly.

To be fair to the totality of the situation, I’ve also considered inviting a stranger. There must be some man somewhere on this wet blue planet to whom I’d be attracted and who would want to visit me on this slender wisp of sand with the express purpose of unrestrained and possibly prelapsarian fucking. I’ve flipped the concept of some strange over and over like a pancake, so much so in fact that it has grown a bit tough. If it’s this hard for me to get roused over the abstract concept, I probably would have a really hard time with the reality.

And so it goes back to Donny, a known and beloved entity with fully known and beloved body parts. I imagine our playing house as a break from our break up and from our lives, as if this house that is not mine nor not his, this place that squats on this space that is neither land nor ocean, and this time that is not quotidian however much every day elements linger and in lingering grow a halo of specialness. In my mind, Donny’s coming would be utopian—attached to nothing, it would hang in space, unchained to expectation.

But I know the cold steel reality of the situation is that none of that is really possible. It is, after all, an imprudent proposal, an idea made unworkable by its churning emotional wake, and the naked fact that Donny, still unable to commit to me, is not the man I want in my life, much less in my pussy. Or possibly the other way around. To give him unfettered access to both, even for just a few days, is tantamount to giving up, bowing down, turning my belly to him and showing submission—and not in the good way.

So alone I’ll probably go it, those handful of days with sun and sand and grilled flesh and fresh corn. It’s not the worst thing that could happen to a girl, especially one like me who has had the metaphoric rug pulled out from under her optimistic legs as often as I have this past year. Still, it seems a shame to waste these days with no one but myself to play with.

spangers for change and strange desires

Where I live in Gotham is terribly progressive and verging on horribly hip. I moved into my apartment almost fifteen years ago—making it the place I’ve lived the longest in my life, which is an oblong concept for me to wrap my mind around—and when I moved into this ex-tenement, there were no locks on the front doors. The local drug dealer hid his stash in the lighting fixture outside my door. It was a building, and a neighborhood, populated primarily by gay dudes, Puerto Rican families, and the occasional person like me who was neither gay nor Puerto Rican.

In the past  fifteen years, I’ve seen this building in specific and Chelsea in general alter radically. The scary bodega downstairs has been replaced with a Thai restaurant staffed by an endless parade of feminine-looking dudes, one of whom looks like Roy Orbison if Roy Orbison had been an Asian cross-dresser. The Army-Navy store has been replaced with a boutique where one complete outfit would cost more than my rent. The little diner with the sign proclaiming “Chewy, Chewy Oats” has been renovated into a super-high end diner drenched in “fun” and “irony.” My building is largely occupied now by people who can afford to shop and eat at such locales.

Being assertively progressive and verging on horribly hip, and being a neighborhood that is residential, commercial and tourist-happy, my neighborhood is besieged by what I call the “Spangers for Change,” people employed to raise money for the ACLU, the Democratic Party, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the World Wildlife Fund, and so on. These people tend to be college students. They tend to look earnest and freshly scrubbed, as if they’ve been exfoliated of all the cynicism that encrusts normal Gothamites. They nearly vibrate with optimism.

They usually stand in book-ends, each at opposite ends of the block, waiting like goalies to block people like me from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. They sometimes wear the t-shirt of their organization of choice. They invariably bear clipboards. They inevitably assault you with this line: “Hi! Do you have a moment for __________?” The Spangers for Change don’t really want your time. They want your money. They may ask for your time, but it’s a ruse, a sham, an insincere come on.

The Spangers for Change (a name I take from the term for the kids who populate the East Village, sit on street corners, and desultorily cry, “Spare change? Spare change?” in such a way that it sounds like “Spange? Spange?”) first appeared about four years ago. Their presence was, like baseball, barbecues and ice cream sandwiches, a summer thing. At first few in number, they were like exotic birds who migrated to aestivate on my block. Then their numbers grew. Soon I was dodging not just Greenpeace and NARAL, but five or six different—and sometimes competing—organizations. And then they were there not just in the summer, but during every college vacation. It’s Spring Break, I wanted to tell them, why the fuck aren’t you out there doing jello shots, having indiscriminate sex, and flashing your tits like a normal person.

I, not surprisingly, turned surly. Going to my laundromat was like running an obstacle course. No, actually, I shouted, I don’t have a moment for reproductive rights. My frustration and my responses escalated in tandem. Soon, I found myself having long disquisitions with these people. I explained to them in  clipped, curt and aggressive sentences that while I used to give money to the Democratic Party/ACLU/World Wildlife Fund, I certainly won’t now because they were RUINING MY LIFE. I made long, impassioned rhetorical arguments to convince these people that what they were doing was counterproductive, intrusive and MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE. And did I mention how they were FUCKING UP MY QUIET TRIP TO THE BANK?

In retrospect, I realize I had edged into the histrionic. But just as one avoids the crazy lady with the bags and the matted hair, these kids started to avoid me, so it worked.

This summer, I have either mellowed or resigned myself to the unavoidable presence of the SfC. I wave at them wearily, like an old elephant too saddened by flies to really care. I haven’t yelled at even one SfC, no matter how chipper they’ve been, nor how resolutely they’ve camped outside my building’s door.

Today, walking to Starbucks, one stopped me. Tall and tousled-haired, he looked like he should be smoking fatties on a beach somewhere. I think he was spanging for the Dems, but I could be wrong. And, damn, he was cute. All kinds of tall, skinny, flat goodness, like a long human length of white boy licorice whip. He stopped me asking if I had a moment for…whomever. I told him, no, thanks. When I returned with my coffee, he stopped me again.

“You’ve come back!” he said and smiled. For a nanosecond, I considered making him a deal: I’ll donate to your cause, I thought, if you fuck me. I briefly imagined turning this SfC into a political whore. If he really believed in the wetlands, I thought, he could put his pecker where his mouth was. I’d write a check his ass could cash.

I had this mental flicker of him in my apartment, the rooms made somehow smaller by his long, linguine presence. I imagined his college boy funk and his ungroomed manbush. I saw his thin thighs wedged between my own more stolid ones. I envisioned the song I could make him sing, my mouth wrapped around his earnest dick.

And then, smiling over my shoulder, I put my key in my door, and left him on the street to accost others more progressive, hipper, and probably less perverse, than me.