I once made my father sign a contract that if I were to die, he would stick a stake of holly through my heart just to make sure that I was not buried alive. I spent a lot of time on the document which was written on Big Chief Paper in red crayon with a black crayoned line for his signature. I'd been reading a lot of Poe and felt nervous, not so much about death, but about being trapped.
My dad signed it, saying, Nobody is going to bury you alive. You have to have faith. Faith wasn't my strong suit in those days, even though I spent a lot of time with the Bible.
One of my favorite moments in the Good Book was the one with the man who wanted to be healed, but couldn't believe that he would be. So he got creative and said, Lord, Cure me of my disbelief! I often think the same thing, that I have faith that I can be given faith.
I'm the type of person who takes things to heart, that carries the weight of the world, not that the world knows or gives one rat's ass. I keep waiting for things to get easier, to calm down. But they don't.
It's kind of like learning how to swim -- I'd struggle to get to someone or something where I could relax. And I would, but then I'd have to let it go and keep going. No rest for the wicked!
Eventually I learned lots of things -- how to tread water, how to jump off a high dive without crawling back down, how to swim without using much energy. The one thing I can't do is float. No matter what I do, I sink.
But other people can so I know it's possible. And I've helped people to shore, been pulled out of the water a few times myself. I've heard it said that love is the truest expression of faith.
So we keep struggling against the waves. Even when they threaten to overtake us, we keep going. Because there's nothing else to do.
I suppose that's faith. And if it's not, then I have faith that it can be.
"I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
" Martin Luther King, Jr. , from a speech in Detroit, Michigan
I, like many writers, am superstitious. Almost every single day for the last ten years, I have listened to the same piece of music when I begin writing, a jazz composition written by Alice Coltrane in honor of famous husband John.
I heard the song in an Alvin Ailey dance production and spent a huge amount of time tracking it down, given that there was no easy way to find things in those long ago, early Internet days. Alice Coltrane died yesterday night in L.A.
, far away from Detroit, where she was born and lived for a long time. I'm sure she had a devoted following, although I doubt that anyone spends quite as much time as I do listening to her one song, over and over again, as a form of inducing a writing trance. Many of my exes have a great dislike toward the song, a hatred one might say, calling it the "garbage can rattling lid" song.
I, however, hope to spend the next ten years listening to it. Rest in peace, Alice Coltrane! And Happy MLK Day to all!
She growled, bared her teeth, and went to the bathroom, where she dumped a potted plant in the tub before leaving to score more drugs. I didn't understand what was happening -- I'd never touched much of anything at that point. I petted the dog and repotted the plant, the Cure in the background singing "Why Can't I Be You.
" I didn't want to be anyone else at that moment and especially not when I returned to school the next Monday and saw her bruised arms. When I asked what happened to her, she said, I hit myself when I'm coming down. It makes me feel better.
Our AP English class had Paradise Lost on the docket for the day. Because I was talking to my friend, my teacher called on me right away to explain what Milton had meant by making a heaven of a hell and a hell of a heaven. She didn't think I had heard the question and wanted to make a point.
I answered it completely, even throwing in a few additional references to Portnoy's Complaint, the book I was reading on the side. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the class; I adored my teacher and didn't want to make her thankless task of getting teenagers interested in Milton anymore difficult than it already was.
When class ended, my teacher asked me to stay after.
I thought she was going to ask what happened to my friend, one of her favorite students, a beautiful girl who looked like she'd been through a few rounds of her own personal Fight Club. But she didn't. She said, Michelle, you're too smart for your own good.
It will lead you to great unhappiness in some ways. Her comment thrilled me. It wasn't as if she'd told me I didn't belong in the class or was hideous in some way.
She hadn't told me I was failing or that she was disappointed in me. I went around all day, happy as could be, feeling special. Then I realized that I'd dressed in the dark and had one black loafer on, one blue one.
They'd looked alike in the dim morning, and I hadn't noticed what a dork I was all day, running around with two different types of shoes, one black, one blue, the colors of my friend's bruises, the colors of shame, and nobody said anything directly, not once, not to either of us.
"No longer feeling bad is not the same as feeling good." Betty Rollin, Last Wish
Happy Tuesday!
Thanks for all the sweet comments! I hope everyone has recovered from the holidays.
Alas, no good or bad deed in playing Cupid goes unpunished, and my story is no different. My friend and the Slow Talker went out on three dates. My friend was a little high-strung, a little bit hospital corners, a little bit House of Usher.
(You see why we are friends!) The Slow Talker was a kind, smart lawyer, a beloved only child without any real issues. The match was, as they say, a few rungs lower than heaven.
His list of sins included wearing sweats on a date, renting terrible movies, taking her to a country place called The Dinner Bell where he'd dated most of the waitstaff, and well, talking slow. I'd never noticed it before she pointed it out, but a lot of his sentences took a long time, as if he were a record set a few seconds off its normal speed.
We all went out once for Chinese food, and that was the beginning and end of my couple friend fantasy life.
The dinner was strained and awkward -- even my very asocial then-boyfriend was working his ass off to make conversation, a sign that things were sinking fast. I'd hoped for a last minute save from the fortune cookies, a divine sign that things were better than they seemed. Ha!
No help from those evil things! I got one that said, You have found love, the same one my then-beloved got. I wished that I could magically transfer mine to my friend, but no such luck.
My friend and the Slow Talker got fortunes that aren't really fortunes, you know, You are artistic and have many friends, etc. The Slow Talker read his slowly, as if he were translating from another language. She smiled at him, like he were a child, not one of her own, not a beloved one, just someone struggling to make sense of what was in front of him.
"I'm standing here, knowing that I have a loaded gun in my mouth, but I love the taste of the metal, and I can't let it go." Robert Downey Jr. at his last court sentencing for drugs
Happy birthday to my dearly departed dad, born a day before Elvis' birthday.
The park I am pictured in was the site of many of his company picnics.
The son had just gotten out of prison for drugs, and he'd gotten AIDS from dirty needles. He'd recently married a woman he'd met in rehab who also had AIDS and two little boys, who were not infected. I had to be dragged by my hair to this event, given that I'm not a social person by nature and while I liked the birthday boy and had written him in prison, I didn't want to endure the horrors of being trapped in a small house with screaming children and no end in sight.
But I went. The father, totally blotto by our arrival, greeted us at the door crying. I suspected that this would be a pretty dismal affair, and so far, my Amazing Karnac impression had proved correct.
The new wife tried to get her boys under control -- they were running around like crazy, hitting all the guests on their heads with a rolled-up Spice Girls poster, yelling, These are the spicy girls! over and over. I began to understand the father's strategy of heavy drinking even though almost everyone there besides my family was in some sort of recovery and could not join him in his tour of duty through a box, yes, a box of wine.
The newlyweds talked about how they had met in group therapy and knew they'd found their soulmates. I never met anyone who got me right away, the birthday boy said. He'd written the same thing about heroin in one of his letters to me and about his last, for lack of a better descriptive word, skanky beyond belief girlfriend who he'd found on the ho' troll in Ft.
Worth whom he'd saved from her pimp. The boys referred to their mother's new husband as "Daddy Two" and talked about Daddy One's slow descent into death. Daddy One used a walker.
Daddy One coughed and had to have a tube. It was enough to make you either count your blessings or want to take the gaspipe. I sat on the couch, accustomed to pretending bizarre situations were completely normal.
The birthday boy's parents looked much older than they were, having been through a wringer they could have never even known existed given their staid, middle-class lives. Years ago, the birthday boy's mother had asked my mother if she could have these evil-looking wooden carved statues that once decorated my parents' house. They were a gift from my mother's relatives in the old country, and my mother believed them cursed.
My mother wanted to throw them out, but gave them away instead because of the request. Now they surrounded us again, glaring at us from the corners of the living room. The drunk father asked if we wanted our picture taken.
My mother was on the verge of getting sick again, my dad had been through a brutal lay-off at work. Everyone had their eyes open, except my sister who was the only one who looked happy, as if she were making a wish. I guess that's what you do at birthday parties.
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Muriel Rukeyser
I once recieved a Christmas gift from a friend that gave me considerable pause.
The first part, a gas station Snoopy glass, gave me great pleasure. The second thing in the box, a t-shirt with a stick figure that held a knife that dripped blood, made me wonder. The caption under the figure read, I Hate Waking Up.
We were at lunch with a lot of people, all exchanging gifts, and nobody knew quite what to say to mine, which I hid away as soon as I could under my seat. I knew I'd never wear it, in the way that I don't have it in me to wear a t-shirt I recently saw that said, Fueled by GHB (the initials for the infamous date rape drug). My friend thought the shirt edgy, and I love edgy gifts.
But I couldn't quite reconcile the impulse with what he knew about my past and his own muddled role in it so I stuffed it in my basement, in hopes that I would not see it any time soon.
To many people's horror, I throw all sorts of things away, having been encouraged by a feng-shui book many moons ago about clearing your clutter and clearing your life. I have cleared my clutter.
Still waiting on the life part, but hope, you know. I have a pretty clean basement as that area represents the past. Even so, it's the repository for things that I cannot throw away.
It's a creepy space to other people, even when it contained nothing. It looks, one of my friends said as she helped me move into my house, like a place where bad things have happened to someone. I saw her point, the bare lights and cement floor, the secret room with shelves to hold clothes and books and dolls.
I spend a lot of time down there, organizing and culling my things, but I've never seen the shirt again. Sometimes when you hide something well, you can't even find it yourself.
"The first need of a free people is to define their own terms.
" Stokely Carmichael
Thanks so much to everyone for all the sweet compliments on my hair! I owe anything that works to my beautiful friend Stacey, a stylist on par with Ken Paves any day! Any problems I attribute to my propensity for thoughtless harsh brushing.
However, I am working on it as well as more frequent conditioning.
The announcer claimed the mood was "reflective" while the images were of a bunch of drunk people yelling and dancing while wearing novelty glasses that said 2007. It didn't seem incredibly thoughtful, but I suppose that the start of a new year can't help but be reflective especially for those who dread such an activity. Thinking about the past means "getting in touch with my feelings" (a dreadful phrase) and finding out that some of them are in fact predictably awful, and it's not an activity I encourage.
Drinking helps until it doesn't. At any rate, I found myself clinging to the abusive leg of the old year until the ball dropped.
All that said, what are we to make of the new year?
Well, the Lions kicked the Dallas Cowboys' asses, making me a very happy camper. The title of this entry comes from the Star Telegram front-page headline in Ft. Worth.
Ha! So that's a start. As for everything else in the world, we'll be watching our televisions next year to find out who made it and who didn't and thinking, damn, how did another year pass without me even knowing it?
"If it ain't rough, it ain't right." RIP Hamilton, Detroit Pistons
If you drank a lot yesterday, like vats and vats until you blacked out, you should try the following recipe to get rid of some of the pain.
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