pretty dumb things

not fade away

I went to only one Grateful Dead show. It was such a perfect experience that despite having chances to go again, and despite trying to prolong that perfect Dead-space by driving around in my '80 Sirocco and listening only to bogarted tapes from some Red Rocks concert that I didn’t even attend, I never went to another. It was at SPAC, this natural outdoor amphitheater a few miles outside of the bucolic town of Saratoga, and I had gone with this other boyfriend and a few friends. We’d all piled in someone’s car, and we’d all dropped acid, everyone except whoever it was who was driving home.

The show was sold out. We parked in a field and hiked to the metal gates of SPAC, and someone kept watch for renta-cops as the rest of us clambered over the seven-foot fence. A tree helped. When I hit the ground, the acid hit too. I spent the next few hours somewhere near the Dead’s sound board, transfixed by the lights going flashy-flash, the noodle-dancers’ languid arms, and the music that echoed my very soul itself, man.

The last song was The Crickets’ “Not Fade Away.” “A love for real, not fade away,” and the last few chords echoed into oblivion well after Jerry and the boys had left the stage a glittering blank, all but its magic carpet and the violence of flowers strewn as at a bull ring.

This past Saturday night, I got an email from an ex-boyfriend, a man whom I’ve not seen in almost thirty years. I dated Ben when I was twenty; he was sixteen. It was in lots of ways both the last teenage relationship of my life and the first adult one. When I rifle through my internal Rolodex, I realize that Ben was the first man I fell in love with (not, however, the first human; that was Marta), and he’s one of the very few whom I continue to love, across time and distance and absence and all that goes with nearly thirty years of time passing like a sludgy quicksilver second.

So there it was, an email in my box with Ben’s name. I read it with that crawling horrorsloth of delight doing that frisson dance in my entrails. It’s an eldritch fucking experience to have someone reach out and touch you from decades away. As it turns out, it’s really rather painful to have the first man you ever loved, a man who wasn’t a man then but given his Gmail profile picture of a graying dude a bit wispy at the temples clutching a baby like a life-raft in a storm is a man now, email you out of the digital black. As it turns out, even when he writes to you lovely things, things about how lucky he was to have you introduce him to sex—and you did, you were his first, but then he was yours too, you just didn’t know it then—even when he writes lovely things like that, it turns out it's really rather painful.

As it turns out, when you get a series of emails (only three, but three makes a series, at least it does in serial killings and baseball; you need at least three, not all at once, to make a series) and one after another laves you with the love and the language, the quirkiness, the remembrance of making out in police cruisers, and the whimsy that made you fall in love all those years ago, as it turns out it’s really rather painful.

So the analytic part of the brain kicks in. You look at the picture of the man white-knuckling his new babe and the time-stamp on the email, and you imagine him and his baby and his new baby’s mother and you know how it is with sex and men and new babies. What with the crying and the leaking and the general ambiance of what-the-fuckedness. The past glows extra-Polaroid rosy when you and yours have been sleepless, or he and his, to be clear. It’s no small eight-pound red-faced squalling nothing that drives a man to wonder what the beauty he to whom he offered his virginity is doing these days. Or nights. Whatever.

And so too kicks in the part that defends with the well-shined armor of snark. It’s hard to pull the dead humor punches when you’re returning emails to a man whom you loved and he’s hoping that your writing is thick with love because that is the word that still gives him the internal flicker-flips. You find it hard not to get your inner Brit on and respond with the humor so arid-it’s-acid. You do your best not to. You do, but it’s so goddamn painful.

And you distance yourself with pop music and too many episodes of mindless television that you boot like heroin, if you had ever done heroin, which you didn’t. It’s not a classic lost weekend, but it’s lost all the same. Because there’s nothing like the email in the dead of night from the first man you ever loved to bring it home that you’re home alone. Another Saturday Night and you ain’t got nobody. Your use of the second-person pronoun is tiresome even to you.

The vampire movie The Hunger came out when I was dating Ben. It played at the one independent movie theatre that Burlington, Vermont had. We walked past the marquee and read the tagline for the film. “Nothing human loves forever,” it said.

I do, I mean I will, I said to him. Ben laughed and told me that was impossible. I’d forget him, he said. He broke up with me a few weeks later. It wasn’t his fault; I understood that the time had passed. I was still in love with him, and so my understanding was shot through with hurt. I got it, but I still loved.

Buddy Holly wrote “Not Fade Away” for his band, The Crickets, when he was twenty. He had the luxury of dying young. 

 

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.

 

pinch drunk

Last Wednesday night, I did something that is such an unbelievable breach of Gotham etiquette, such a mark of extreme louche behavior, such a shame-making urban act that every time I have confessed it to another Gothamite—and confess it I have, as if the telling of it will scrub my soul clean—to a one, they have reacted the same way: A jerk of the head, a gasp, and an exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

“Oh, no!”: it’s the same words, but it’s not the same exclamation as when I had my iPhone jacked out of my bleeding hands on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I had a roommate move out taking as much stuff as he could carry (including, inexplicably, the light bulb from the ceiling). It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I went to work one night in the ‘90s and found my strip club door padlocked with a big Marshall sign on it proclaiming the property seized. It’s the same words but not the same exclamation because while the other situations occasioned compassioned and understanding, this one engendered only horror and the clear, unadorned relief that what happened to me had not happened to them.

And what had I done? I got so drunk that I puked in a cab. It was the full cliché glory of taxicab puking. An unanticipated need. A thin rivulet of bourbon stink. An irate taxi driver. An inability to find my wallet. A quick panic. A huge payment. An unsteady mile-long walk home in high heels. It was ugly. May it never happen to you.

Slender are the surface facts that brought me to puking in the back of a Gotham taxi. I’d been busy all day and I’d not eaten much. I think my grand total of food for the day amounted to five eggs, two corn tortillas, a pile of potatoes and a couple threads of green beans. I rushed off to a party, stopping only to grab a bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky whiskey from my local liquor store. At the party, we all dispensed with glasses and took slugs out of the bottle, in a circle, totemically, as if we were sharing a hookah.

I don’t, therefore, have a clear idea of how much I drank, but it probably wasn’t much more than a customary heavy pour. I’ve never held my liquor well under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were not even in the same congressional code as the best.

But the surface facts really don’t tell the whole story and the whole story is that I went to that party with full intention to get drunk. Not as drunk as I got, nor as quickly, messily, shamefully or as pointlessly, but drunk. I wanted to get drunk because the day before I discovered that the doctor who performed my rotator cuff surgery is, and I quote my insurance company, “outside my network.” I owe him just under $13,000. It may be immature, and certainly for me very unusual behavior, but I wanted a night when I could forget the money and feel angry about it simultaneously and illogically.

I’m not good with money. I’ve written before about how bad with money I am. Money is hard to write about. I’d rather write about the seamier side of my sex life than my bank balance. I feel shame over being as deeply, profoundly and, let’s face it, inescapably in the red as I am. Again, the surface explanations for my extreme in-the-redness are fairly simple. I’m bad with math. In fact, I have dyscalculia, which makes negotiating numbers incredibly hazardous and anxiety provoking. My parents never taught me to manage money. They dropped the ball on that, as they did on many other things like table manners, social etiquette and playing well with others. And money has never been much of a driving force. It’s nice to have, but I’ve never really cared about a status of living that affords me much beyond the general basics adorned with an occasional furbelow.

But the three-D truth is naturally more complex, and the truth is that I never really considered myself worth much. Therefore, managing my money wasn’t a priority. I didn’t think I’d be here very long. I thought I’d be dead by my own hand or, more likely, by an “accident.” I didn’t pay attention to my student loan debt. I owe in the low six figures. I didn’t pay attention to my taxes. I owe in the low four figures. I didn’t pay attention to my credit cards. I owe in the mid-four figures. I have a lot of debt.

What I don’t have are assets. I own nothing. I don’t have a car, a house, an apartment, jewelry, stocks, bonds, or anything anyone would want to buy on E-Bay. I have over a hundred snow-domes and too much vintage Norma Kamali and ten pairs of Frye boots. I have second-hand furniture and a computer that’s going to celebrate its fifth birthday. I have many pairs of Wolford tights. And that’s about it.

Shockingly, I’d begun to make peace with it, my lack of ownership and debt, and I’d begun to take measures to make my debt more manageable. In fact, I have an appointment with an accountant tomorrow, an appointment I’m going to have to cancel because I can’t afford it. In the past couple of years, I had begun to take steps to fashion a life that allowed my ends to meet, that would help my hand reach my mouth and feed me, that would—perhaps—allow me to pay my debt while living. I, in short, got a job that I hated. And then I quit that one, and I got a job that I actually like.

At 46, in the worst economy since the Great Depression, I got the things that culture had been telling me I should get while I clapped my hands over my ears and sang “La la lala, academia lalala, freelance writing la la la.” I got a job. I got a pension. I got health insurance. At 47, I got another job. I got an IRA. I got different health insurance. I got doctor’s appointments. I got surgery. I got a great, big stinking debt that I wasn’t expecting, and I got it just when I was towing the cultural row, doing the work that I didn’t like and then work that I sort of like, but whatever. I was living the life I had never wanted. I was living the life of a schnook.

A few weeks ago, I was out at dinner with three others: a big-deal writer, a writer poised on the brink of being a big deal, and a writer whom we all believe will be a big deal. We were talking about the necessity of being successful and the big deal writer’s belief that to make a dream come true you need to say you’ll do it, out loud, to others. I told him about my six-figure student loan debt and then I devolved into my anxiety about a penniless future. He stared at me and said levelly: “You can’t worry about all that yet. You just need to get to broke.”

He is right, of course. Right now, my goal is to get to broke. Not to save. Not to buy. Not to pad the walls of my Spartan cage with downy softness. To fill in with dollars and cents the yawning cavern of debt. The debt that weighs on me, that makes my life unmanageable, that in my mind marks me and makes me unattractive, unmarriable, this yowling anti-dowery that not all the goats in the world could counterbalance. (Tell me now that your self-worth isn’t inextricably tied to your bank balance.) Right now my goal is to get even, and even is something I’ll never get working this $60,000 a year job.

In that dinner conversation, I agreed with the big deal writer. He looked at me again, the gears in his labyrinthine brain going full spin. “What sexually explicit and intimate memoirs have sold?” he asked. “I mean, have any?”  I was stumped. (I still am.) I was taken aback. (I still am.) I was crushed. (I still am.)

I’ll be over there in the corner, curled fetal, but without the bourbon. It’s bad enough to be plunged in an industrial sized vat of fiscal despair. I don’t need to puke in a taxi to remind me of my shame.

 

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

the weight and the loss

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

long live Luna Lovegood

The thing about living in New York is that no matter who you are, what you look like, or what you enjoy, there is somewhere in this city a community ready to welcome you. Are you a cross-dressing surf punk? An Eastern European animator-contortionist? Seasonally employed Zamboni-driver/Good Humor man? Sexually attracted to lichen? There’s undoubtedly a place for you here in Gotham, a place where your predilection is not merely accepted but expected. I may not know where, but I’m sure someone does.

The unsightly pallid underbelly of this acceptance is, however, the flip side that no matter who you are, no matter how conventional, no matter how “normal,” no matter how little you’d frighten little old ladies in a Skokee, Illinois beauty parlor, cause muttering in Swan River, Montana Grange Hall, engender hushed epithets at a Baton Rouge tea, or fisticuffs in Hollister a biker bar, there is always somewhere else that you’re completely offensive. Everyone offends somewhere. It’s a comforting kind of discomfiting equality.

If you believe Marlo Thomas, you and I are free to be you and me, but the truth is we don’t often avail ourselves of that freedom. Most people spend grand swaths of their lives feeling constrained to be one of the masses. This point that becomes especially ironic here in America where our Declaration of Independence assures us “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is one country that likes to present conformity as the shortest line between us and that aforementioned inalienable happiness.

It’s too bad, really.

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.

death: the banal frontier

Death, it seems, comes not from on high, nor in a carriage, nor on little cat feet, but with casseroles. Or in my Uncle Aaron’s case, and in my Aunt Ava’s condo, also with babka, bagels and cookies. Death seems to have a preoccupation with carbs.

Unsurprising to those who know me, I have a minor obsession with death. I’m currently watching season 3 of Six Feet Under, reading Julian Barnes’ mortality memoir, Nothing to Fear, and working on a short story whose first line is “When your roommate is a vampire, you have to solve the tampon issue”—and no item on this list is particularly uncommon for my life. My own suicidal tendencies are so recurrent that I’ve said the song of my life is a funeral dirge. It's not that I am much frightened of nor concerned about what happens after death, nor am I enthralled with the concept of it. It’s more that I am quite often in pain and find bemusing the fact that some day I will die, like everyone else.

I have been to six funerals in my life. My first was my grandfather’s wake; he hung himself when I was twelve. I don’t remember much about the service other than I very quickly grew tired of people’s pity for me and their anger toward him. The second was my stepfather’s father who died when I was nineteen; I can’t recall exactly why, perhaps a heart attack. The sadness I felt seemed abstract, as if my grief were a Rothko painting. I didn’t know this grandfather well, but I liked him. Primarily, I felt for my stepfather. My mother’s mother died the next year from a stroke, and that was a huge, though not unexpected, loss. I took quite a break from death and funerals. Then, when I was 32, my ex-boyfriend Will overdosed. That was a weird, weird scene in which many people threw passionate bolts of love and hate in my direction. A few years ago a friend of mine’s dad died, and I went to his funeral to support her. And this past week, of course, I went to Philly for my Uncle Aaron’s.

My life experience with death is quite limited. I have only those six funerals. The only deaths I’ve witnessed have been those of dogs; I held their paws and bid them to go gently into that good night. I have watched scads of deaths and funerals on film and television and read of hordes of others, but nothing brings into high relief the artifice of those fictional ends of lives like going to an real, live funeral.

It’s not surprising that we humans paint the ends of human life in such saturated colors. We do, after all, paint everything else with more intensity. No birth, no first tooth, no first day of school, no pangs of adolescence, no first love, no break-up, no hellish job, no courtship, no marriage, no divorce, no bank robbery, no computer hacking, no crime investigation, no abortion, no political scandal, no betrayal, no ugly-duckling-turned-swan, no empire’s rising, no epiphany, no war, no peace and no death have the glamour, the sheen and the cleanliness of its fictive counterpart. Fictive lives are shinier than our real ones. Even the mess seems prettier.

And what these fictions cover up is exactly how tiresome the process of life is—even as they celebrate how wondrous it can be. The truth about funerals is that they bring bone-weariness and boredom. The casserole, that infinitely reheating self-contained dish that may be quite good or really bad but is never exceptional, may very well be the perfect metaphor for funerals.

My Uncle Aaron’s service was not much different from most funeral services. The Rabbi talked like Reverend Lovejoy, dropping the ends of sentences like stones off a cliff and then suddenly switching it up and making the last word soar like a swallow. The eulogy itself was a sudden apotheosis of my uncle. He was the loveliest, the warmest, the funniest, the most loving, the most generous, the most everything. My Aunt Ava sat directly in front of me sobbing fiercely, and I, being an empathetic crier, wept along with her. Other people cried too, while some didn’t. All listened to the Rabbi’s superlatives. The funeral service, is after all, for the living, and my family is as much like everyone else’s as it isn’t.

The living leave a funeral immersed in their own mortality—how can we not? Don’t ask for whom the casserole comes, it comes for thee. And plunged into my own mortal introspection, I thought about what I wanted for my eulogy. I don’t want superlatives, for one thing. I want whoever speaks at my service to show me as the complicated, contentious, sarcastic woman I am. A speaker with a strong sense of the absurd would be swell. I don’t want my living to remember some whitewashed, sanitized version of me. If they loved me well in life, they’re fully aware of my glorious faults and my faulty glory. They might as well get one last full measure.

This past fall when I was fully immersed in my suicidal font, I wrote a suicide note and started plotting my service. It was a profoundly pathetic experience, as well as a cathartic one. Nothing so much yanked me back from the brink as my self-laving in self-pity, and the fantasy service was the pitiable straw that broke the solipsistic camel’s back. Really, how many people have played “Moonlight Mile” at their funeral? This was the depth to which I had sunk, and stunned by my own operatic dismalness, I clawed my way out of the open grave.

I didn’t know my uncle Aaron very well; in fact, I’d not seen him in over 25 years. He may very well have been as exceptional as his eulogy described. I could just be seeing his service through my own sardonic lens, in which case shame on me. I didn’t know the man well, and yet I had to honor Aaron, my memory of him and his small imprint on my life, which will last as long as I do.

I also went because I wanted to serve as another buttress in my aunt’s monolith of grief; the more people who surround the grieving, the less they have to bear. It’s what the living do. We go and we eat bagels and we cry as we let others cry on us. We drink bad coffee and we pick at the babka. It may be banal, but it’s life, and therefore it is beautiful.

résumé or why i write of Dorothy Parker

Of late, I’ve found myself awake in the small, dark hours of the morning dissecting Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé.” It’s one of the very few poems I’ve memorized; the others are a couple of Hamlet’s soliloquies. I have a thing for suicidal poetry and not much else, though I can rattle off the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I may be terribly pretentious, but I tend to the prosaic. And yet “Résumé” circles like a buzzard in my brain.

some clean, well-fitted sheets

Let’s just begin with the starkly factual, shall we?

Two years ago, my then-boyfriend Donny bought me a lovely knock-off Tempur-Pedic® mattress. A year later, after we’d broken up, Donny bought himself the same mattress in a Queen size (which, parenthetically, was a size bigger than his old bed and the size I’d been advocating for him to buy but that he resisted saying it wouldn’t fit through his hall, an idea I pooh-poohed and which subsequently was shown to be correct in pooh-poohing, but I digress). He did not buy himself new sheets. Rather, he chose to suffer as a martyr to his sheets, apparently refusing to accept the full flower of comfort his new bed could offer.

In the past few months, I’ve seen Donny a few times. I recognized now how completely ill-thought-out my recurrent decisions to see him have been, how much through seeing him I’ve willingly allowed my fragile psyche to suffer, and how thoroughly I must cut off all contact with him. Whilst in the throes of Donny, however, I realized none of that, and I was suffused with the Donny warm-and-fuzzy of yore. In the midst of that optimistic glow, I bought him a set of sheets for his birthday.

They are lovely sheets, if pictures and customer testimonials can be believed, and I like to think they can. They are ice blue, 800ct, Egyptian cotton sheets that were sold on Overstock.com at a ludicrously low price. I ordered them for Donny because it was his birthday and because as thoughtless as he has been emotionally, he has been terribly generous materially, and I incorrectly thought that buying the sheets was the least I could do.

Buying him nothing, I realize now, would have actually been the least I could do, but the sheets have been bought, and they have been delivered, and while I’m sure that Donny continues his bed-linen martyrdom, I like to think he’s washed them and dressed his bed properly.

It is hard when talking about a couple, a bed, a break-up, and all the echoing emotional resonance surrounding the break-up, not to tread upon the metaphoric. Put a bed and a break-up into a story and you’re going to load it with figurative pathos with a mechanical kind of precision. This story, this break-up and this bed is no different.

I think of Donny sleeping in his shoddy, slippy sheets. I know him well enough to feel the palpable anxiety he has over buying the full bed kit and caboodle, for he needs not merely new sheets but new bedcovers, new pillows, new everything. It is a lot, and I sense Donny’s overwhelmed feeling. But I also know him well enough to know that to this man a rose may be a rose be a rose, but a bed is not a bed is not a bed. A bed has meaning.

I know my X well enough to recognize that his refusal to fully flesh the comfort of the new mattress is as much to preclude him from being fully rested, fully relaxed or fully sexed. The ill-fitting sheets create an excuse for Donny not to invite anyone to his bed; he can’t be seen with these crazy sheets that flap and wad and come, like an unbalanced mind, undone. He also can’t give to himself the full gift of physical contentment. He must, like a medieval priest, mortify his flesh. He girds his loins with that Catholic shirt of guilt. I know him well enough to know this.

So Donny’s refusal to buy new sheets for ten months after buying a new mattress is a complex psychological, emotional and spiritual issue. It is a tangled knot of guilt, protection, and anxiety. It’s also ridiculous because he has, in the past ten months, also bought several new pieces of furniture (including two different bed frames), painted his entire apartment, refinished his floors, and hired a decorator to help him with all of it. This thick tectonic plate of home-decorating evidence adds credence to my theory that Donny’s stalwart unwillingness to buy new sheets has nothing to do with his bed and everything to do with his head. This is, after all, a man who has refused to make his bed, and in doing so, he only partially lies in it.

That is Donny’s sheet metaphor. I have my own.

For the thing is this: I can rationalize my buying of sheets as an altruistic move on the part of a still-loving girlfriend who, above all, just wants the best for her X. And on some level that is true, though in my heart of darkest hearts I wish that while Donny does well, I myself do a little better. I can rationalize my untoward purchase as the last act of my love, but I know better.

I know that my choice to buy sheets is as much loaded—nay, fraught—with symbolism as his refusal. I know that these sheets are a potent symbol. Things hold the ineffable halo of those who touched, or bought, them. I will always, for example, connect my breasts with Will because he lent me the money for my implants. Likewise, my back right lower molar belongs to Donny, for he paid for its cap, and I’d have lost that tooth were it not for his benevolence. Given this invisible and undeniable connection between object and giver,  if Donny uses these sheets, and he may not, Donny will feel me. He will be even more reminded of me than he already is. He will be touched, at night, in the dark, at his most vulnerable moments, by the long hand of the relationship-dead me. And he will, eventually, have sex with another woman on a tangible, 800ct, luxury reminder of me. I know all this; I knew it buying the sheets; and yet I still bought them.

Because rationalization is a human trait, I must offer it here. I bought the set of sheets (bottom fitted with 18” pockets, top flat and two pillowcases) in the sanguine blush that he and I might reconcile. It was a stupid hope, a jejune hope, a hope far too green for a woman of my olive age, but it was a hope I had. The hope is dead. I have really, truly totally realized that he and I are finished, and now that the Mad Hatter’s pity party has hopped on down the bunny trail, I’m learning to live with it. The long, slow and agonizing death of this relationship has caused me to experience the five stages of grief. I believe acceptance has finally started to settle like concrete. It’s something to build on.

I myself, unlike the waiter at the end of the Hemingway story, am sleeping just fine. I have not, like the dignified drunk old man, actually tried to commit suicide, though I have imagined it. Those days seem past, these days, and these nights, though I recognize that many must have insomnia, I’m not one of them.