Friday, April 13, 2012
the capital of urban unrest
South Africa is leading the world in urban protest. According to police statistics, there were 27 protests in cities across the country every day, and 3 protests every day involved what the cops euphemistically call "unrest incidents." Arrests, thankfully, have gone down this year. But over the past 3 years more than 12,500 people have been arrested at these demos. It is, as the Mail & Guardian details, a "rebellion of the poor."
Thursday, April 12, 2012
good governance quote of the day, 12 April
Silvio Berlusconi's lawyer, Niccolò Ghedini, admitting that the former Italian PM paid 127,000 euros to the families of three women who are scheduled to be witnesses at his upcoming trial:
"The linking of the payments with the fact they are witnesses in the so-called Ruby trial is absolutely spurious and without foundation," Ghedini said. "With his usual generosity, Berlusconi has sought to help, in a totally transparent fashion through bank transfers, those people who have been caught up in the media storm built around inexistent claims and who are living through an extremely difficult period economically, professionally and on the home front."
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
the journalist and the joyrider
This article dates back 18 years, but the kicker seems as important as ever. "Being a reporter," I wrote, "doesn't mean you stop being a person."
I was writing in reaction to a mostly forgotten tempest--the Jeffrey Masson/Janet Malcolm/Joe McGuinness entanglement--but that one-liner remains relevant given the revelations that many reporters in the UK committed crimes--including hacking phones, phishing for data, and bribing the police in the pursuit of scoops and juicy details.
I was writing in reaction to a mostly forgotten tempest--the Jeffrey Masson/Janet Malcolm/Joe McGuinness entanglement--but that one-liner remains relevant given the revelations that many reporters in the UK committed crimes--including hacking phones, phishing for data, and bribing the police in the pursuit of scoops and juicy details.
the journalist and the joyrider.
All reporters, deep down, love good stories. I admit: I love murder. I love tragedy. I love sexy trials. I love political corruption. I love exposing the emperor's new clothes.
Working on a good story is like joyriding in a sports car after having spent your life in a sedan--you want to floor it, patch out, thrash the transmission, put the beast through its paces.
Janet Malcolm undoubtedly saw Jeffrey Masson as a good story. Her profile in the New Yorker was devastating. I am sure she heartily enjoyed every minute of it.
Last month, a jury declared that Malcolm had libeled Masson by using quotes that were not backed up by her notes or tapes. Certainly, all journalists should take note of the verdict. However, there is another concern in the case, one that has not gotten much attention--except, ironically, from Malcolm herself: The issue of bad faith.
I know all about bad faith. I have been guilty of it many times. So have most reporters I know.
I have paid for stories when I knew my money was being used to buy drugs the minute I left the scene. I have deliberately misled people I was interviewing--sometimes putting on a show of sympathy to get juicier quotes.
I have delayed calling people I was writing about until the last possible moment, trying to catch them off guard. I have hidden scoops from my competitors and lied to them about it.
I am not proud about any of this, but I can assure you that, in each case, I thought I was doing my job.
A few years ago, though, that all changed. An editor put me in touch with a man who had had a stroke. He talked haltingly, with a stutter. He could take 15 minutes to find one word. However, this was a big improvement. For almost a year after his stroke, he had been unable to speak at all.
I spent hours with him to make sure I had his story right: He believed the corrupt leaders of his municipal union had poisoned him.
I began to check his account. It was all circumstantial. He had been a member of a dissident union faction. The union president had been accused of corruption, but none of the other dissidents had come down with a mysterious illness, and there was no it known drug that could have caused his symptoms.
As I worked, I decided to pursue a different, more compelling story--the story of a man who had made the arduous journey back from a stroke and was now trying to make sense of his illness.
I told him, over and over, that I was not going to write the story he wanted me to write. He always agreed and then returned to his central theme: This happened to him. It was fact. All I had to do was write it down the way he rehearsed it.
I realized then the difference between his goal and mine. He came to me for vindication. If I told his story, his ideas would be legitimized, his world affirmed. I came to him looking for a good story. I wanted to joyride.
Ultimately, I decided not to write about his case. No story is more important than the person it is about.
I am not saying that journalists should cover up for corrupt politicians because an article might hurt their feelings. But I do believe that if we are going to expose someone in print, we have an obligation to tell them what we think--face to face if possible. We do not let them hide in their houses and offices. So why should we be able to hide behind our pages?
I imagine many journalists will argue that a person who talks with a reporter knows the risks. But I think most people, even the most self-assured, talk to reporters because they want their side of events recorded. They want to be proved right and, if you treat your sources as friends, you owe it to them to tell them straight out what you think.
That is why it was wrong for Joe McGinniss not to tell Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of his true-crime book Fatal Vision, that McGinniss believed MacDonald had murdered his wife and kids.
MacDonald had opened up to McGinniss, had made the author part of his life, and McGinniss had betrayed that trust, not by writing the book but by hiding his conclusions from the man he was writing about.
In her book on the McGinniss-MacDonald dispute, Malcolm says all reporters are, in essence, charlatans, "preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse."
She suggests that we should feel "some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship."
Indeed we should. So should she. Malcolm spent hours talking with Masson, even putting him up at her house, as if she were his friend.
Ultimately, she concluded that Masson was, in some of her nicer words, "impudent," "complicated," "unruly," but she never told him. To Masson, it appeared that Malcolm had hooked him in and then, with no warning, vilified him. I am sure he felt it was an unprovoked attack.
Certainly, fabricating quotes is wrong. Stitching them together in a dishonest way is wrong. But I am afraid that most journalists will dismiss the Malcolm-Masson case as a simple mater of libel and lose sight of the ethical point. Being a journalist does not mean you stop being a person.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
ex libris
In mid-July, five weeks after the author David Markson died, his books began to show up on the carts at the Strand Book Store for a buck apiece.
Not the books he wrote. The books he owned. His books. The ones he signed his name in.
Early on, in 1951, on the inside cover of an incomplete translation of Mallarmé’s poems, he signed in formal fashion: David M. Markson, in perfect penmanship, the last name set off with a rising fountain pen slash, the graffiti tag of an easier era. Along the tail—the bottom edge of the book—he added a youthful redundancy: his three initials. Markson was 23 then and it would be eight years until his first book, Epitaph for a Tramp, would appear in print.
Once his work moved toward publication, his signature disintegrated. No more first name and middle initial. No monogram on the tail. Just Markson now, occasionally with a line under it, scribbled in ballpoint on the inside of paperbacks of Maimonides, Orwell, Rilke, and de Sade. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin, he added a location and a date—Mexico, 1960—and, as if in confirmation, the volume is stamped in three places as the property of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. Did Markson buy the book or boost it? No point in asking. This organization, founded in 1950 and most famous for giving Juan Rulfo a stipend and a place to go to write Pedro Páramo, his dark novel of the dead, ran out of cash and issued a notice announcing its own death in 2005.
What does it mean for a writer to sign his name in the books he read? Were they as important to him as the books he wrote? Or, maybe, more important? Is his connection to the world to be found in his own works or in the works of others that, by writing his name in them, he announced were his, too?
Markson, who died on June 4, 2010, started as a genre writer. Three detective novels (his recent books refer to these as entertainments rather than novels.) A western. Several realistic fictions. Then, with Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published in 1988 after collecting 54 rejections, his output turned inward.
In my copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I bought at the Strand for a buck, a prior owner, who bought it at the Strand for a few bucks more, left a helpful message on the receipt. Don’t look now but the train to dementia is leaving + you my friend are about to board/Don’t look now but the train to dementia is pulling away from the station and you’re on it.
Markson’s last four books are a series of delicate, almost plotless works in which the narrator—named Author twice, Reader once, and finally Novelist—drops away and the prose slithers forward through terse quotations and stand-alone sentences that resist the imposition of an interlocking whole. To do away with plot and narrative is, in a sense, to do away with time—and Markson’s final four read like an amazing feat of holding your breath out: your pulse slowly slows, the seconds divide into farsighted distance, individuality edges towards an unspoken and unspeakable universal.
Markson lived in the West Village, not far from the Strand, a store which, in a nice parallel, opened its doors in 1927, the same year he was born.
At the end of Markson’s last novel, published in 2007 and called—perhaps aptly—The Last Novel, an aging writer heads up the stairs of his Greenwich Village apartment building, beyond his own floor, to the top:
At a reading at the 92nd Street Y in 2007, Markson noted that 98.5 percent of the book involved quotations from others. At the same reading, Markson defined his literary approach: to see how little I can get away with with.
Five weeks after his death seems too soon for his collection to trickle out. Did no one want the library of this writer whose work was so informed by the words of others? Or perhaps this was his wish—to liberate these books from the lock-down of his shelves and thereby become a literary Johnny Appleseed, strewing odd volumes to the public through the crude mechanism of the free market (and a buck a book is about as free as the free market gets these days.)
These tramp-steamer books, found on the carts outside the Strand, are the last work of a writer who, to the end, let others have the last word.
Not the books he wrote. The books he owned. His books. The ones he signed his name in.
Early on, in 1951, on the inside cover of an incomplete translation of Mallarmé’s poems, he signed in formal fashion: David M. Markson, in perfect penmanship, the last name set off with a rising fountain pen slash, the graffiti tag of an easier era. Along the tail—the bottom edge of the book—he added a youthful redundancy: his three initials. Markson was 23 then and it would be eight years until his first book, Epitaph for a Tramp, would appear in print.
Once his work moved toward publication, his signature disintegrated. No more first name and middle initial. No monogram on the tail. Just Markson now, occasionally with a line under it, scribbled in ballpoint on the inside of paperbacks of Maimonides, Orwell, Rilke, and de Sade. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin, he added a location and a date—Mexico, 1960—and, as if in confirmation, the volume is stamped in three places as the property of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. Did Markson buy the book or boost it? No point in asking. This organization, founded in 1950 and most famous for giving Juan Rulfo a stipend and a place to go to write Pedro Páramo, his dark novel of the dead, ran out of cash and issued a notice announcing its own death in 2005.
What does it mean for a writer to sign his name in the books he read? Were they as important to him as the books he wrote? Or, maybe, more important? Is his connection to the world to be found in his own works or in the works of others that, by writing his name in them, he announced were his, too?
Markson, who died on June 4, 2010, started as a genre writer. Three detective novels (his recent books refer to these as entertainments rather than novels.) A western. Several realistic fictions. Then, with Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published in 1988 after collecting 54 rejections, his output turned inward.
In my copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I bought at the Strand for a buck, a prior owner, who bought it at the Strand for a few bucks more, left a helpful message on the receipt. Don’t look now but the train to dementia is leaving + you my friend are about to board/Don’t look now but the train to dementia is pulling away from the station and you’re on it.
Markson’s last four books are a series of delicate, almost plotless works in which the narrator—named Author twice, Reader once, and finally Novelist—drops away and the prose slithers forward through terse quotations and stand-alone sentences that resist the imposition of an interlocking whole. To do away with plot and narrative is, in a sense, to do away with time—and Markson’s final four read like an amazing feat of holding your breath out: your pulse slowly slows, the seconds divide into farsighted distance, individuality edges towards an unspoken and unspeakable universal.
Markson lived in the West Village, not far from the Strand, a store which, in a nice parallel, opened its doors in 1927, the same year he was born.
At the end of Markson’s last novel, published in 2007 and called—perhaps aptly—The Last Novel, an aging writer heads up the stairs of his Greenwich Village apartment building, beyond his own floor, to the top:
Access to Roof for Emergency Only. Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.Some boilerplate from a lawsuit-leery landlord. Five one-word sentences by Markson himself. A quote from philosopher George Santayana. And, to end the book, a fragment inscribed by Jan van Eyck on the frame of his 1433 canvas Portrait of a Man in a Turban. This last, Markson rendered five ways: The best I can do. That’s it. I can do no more. All I have left. I can go no further.
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Als ick kan.
At a reading at the 92nd Street Y in 2007, Markson noted that 98.5 percent of the book involved quotations from others. At the same reading, Markson defined his literary approach: to see how little I can get away with with.
Five weeks after his death seems too soon for his collection to trickle out. Did no one want the library of this writer whose work was so informed by the words of others? Or perhaps this was his wish—to liberate these books from the lock-down of his shelves and thereby become a literary Johnny Appleseed, strewing odd volumes to the public through the crude mechanism of the free market (and a buck a book is about as free as the free market gets these days.)
These tramp-steamer books, found on the carts outside the Strand, are the last work of a writer who, to the end, let others have the last word.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Adam Smith, Union Man
Memo to the Washington insiders who have been shying away from Card Check (a.k.a. the Employee Free Choice Act—the bill that would make it possible for workers to vote to join a union by simply filling out a form): Adam Smith, the founding philosopher of the free market, would probably have supported it.
Smith was not afraid of high wages. In Wealth of Nations, his classic outline of capitalist principles that was published in 1776, Smith made it clear that astronomical profits are a much greater contributor to high prices than rising wages. "In reality," he wrote, "high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages."
Here’s his argument, updated: if all the workers making minimum wage (currently $6.55 an hour, and set to rise to $7.25 in July) at a busy D.C. deli want to unionize in order to gain a dollar more per hour, it’s easy to determine what that would cost consumers. Simply multiply the number of laborers times the number of hours they work each day and divide by the number of items they produce. If five employees sell 50 sandwiches each in an eight hour shift, that 15 percent bump in wages would cost customers just 16 cents per tuna melt—a mere 2.3 percent bite on a sandwich that previously sold for $6.95.
By contrast, if the deli owner wants 15 percent more in profits, those same sandwiches would jump to $7.99—$1.04 more. And if the owner and the distributor he buys from both want 15 percent more, the price of a deli sandwich would jump to $9.19—15 percent compounded on top of 15 percent.
"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad," Smith wrote. "They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
The self-interest of laborers, Smith wrote, is "strictly connected with the interest of the society." By contrast, the self-interest of "those who live from profit" is murkier. The rate of profit, Smith noted, is "naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin."
Smith's conclusion? Capitalists are "an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Which is why—and this is key for consideration of Card Check—he strenuously urged that policy pronouncements from big business and its shills—the folks who are now crying that the Employee Free Choice Act violates democratic principles—"ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous but with the most suspicious attention."
Smith didn’t specifically say that unions were a benign influence. But he understood that giving workers a better deal was an economic stimulus: "The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives."
Reading Smith is revelatory. Our popular assumption about the unfettered pursuit of profit—that it is the world’s greatest method for providing for all people—turns out to be a misreading of the capitalist sage. Here’s a key statement: "In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, where in every particular branch of business there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it, as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it, would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money."
Having enough goods to satisfy every person’s every need, then, would cause profits to droop and interest rates to tumble. So, if the profit motive is paramount, as Smith insisted it is, a businessman should never try to satisfy all the demand for his or her product. That’s why it’s not in the interest of real estate developer to have lots of apartments and homes available—because that lowers rents and purchase prices. And it never behooves grain dealers to market enough rice to feed the world’s starving—because the price per pound would sink into the paddies. Wise capitalists, in short, seek sufficient scarcity to support a high price, and uncontrolled capitalism is unlikely to provide for the needs of all people.
Smith was unconcerned about this. He saw the self-regulating market not as a mechanism for individual riches, but as a system that would provide for the overall well-being of countries. That’s why he called his book Wealth of Nations (the full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) and not simply Wealth. For Smith, the "invisible hand" of the market would naturally bring this about.
Surveying today’s crippled auto industry and the bailed-out banks with their bloated swill of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, many have come to see Smith’s invisible hand as mythical, fictional and delusional. Card check and other appropriate regulations offer a blueprint for creating the stable, healthy, well-educated and well-off populace that is the true wealth of nations.
Smith was not afraid of high wages. In Wealth of Nations, his classic outline of capitalist principles that was published in 1776, Smith made it clear that astronomical profits are a much greater contributor to high prices than rising wages. "In reality," he wrote, "high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages."
Here’s his argument, updated: if all the workers making minimum wage (currently $6.55 an hour, and set to rise to $7.25 in July) at a busy D.C. deli want to unionize in order to gain a dollar more per hour, it’s easy to determine what that would cost consumers. Simply multiply the number of laborers times the number of hours they work each day and divide by the number of items they produce. If five employees sell 50 sandwiches each in an eight hour shift, that 15 percent bump in wages would cost customers just 16 cents per tuna melt—a mere 2.3 percent bite on a sandwich that previously sold for $6.95.
By contrast, if the deli owner wants 15 percent more in profits, those same sandwiches would jump to $7.99—$1.04 more. And if the owner and the distributor he buys from both want 15 percent more, the price of a deli sandwich would jump to $9.19—15 percent compounded on top of 15 percent.
"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad," Smith wrote. "They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
The self-interest of laborers, Smith wrote, is "strictly connected with the interest of the society." By contrast, the self-interest of "those who live from profit" is murkier. The rate of profit, Smith noted, is "naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin."
Smith's conclusion? Capitalists are "an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Which is why—and this is key for consideration of Card Check—he strenuously urged that policy pronouncements from big business and its shills—the folks who are now crying that the Employee Free Choice Act violates democratic principles—"ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous but with the most suspicious attention."
Smith didn’t specifically say that unions were a benign influence. But he understood that giving workers a better deal was an economic stimulus: "The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives."
Reading Smith is revelatory. Our popular assumption about the unfettered pursuit of profit—that it is the world’s greatest method for providing for all people—turns out to be a misreading of the capitalist sage. Here’s a key statement: "In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, where in every particular branch of business there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it, as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it, would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money."
Having enough goods to satisfy every person’s every need, then, would cause profits to droop and interest rates to tumble. So, if the profit motive is paramount, as Smith insisted it is, a businessman should never try to satisfy all the demand for his or her product. That’s why it’s not in the interest of real estate developer to have lots of apartments and homes available—because that lowers rents and purchase prices. And it never behooves grain dealers to market enough rice to feed the world’s starving—because the price per pound would sink into the paddies. Wise capitalists, in short, seek sufficient scarcity to support a high price, and uncontrolled capitalism is unlikely to provide for the needs of all people.
Smith was unconcerned about this. He saw the self-regulating market not as a mechanism for individual riches, but as a system that would provide for the overall well-being of countries. That’s why he called his book Wealth of Nations (the full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) and not simply Wealth. For Smith, the "invisible hand" of the market would naturally bring this about.
Surveying today’s crippled auto industry and the bailed-out banks with their bloated swill of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, many have come to see Smith’s invisible hand as mythical, fictional and delusional. Card check and other appropriate regulations offer a blueprint for creating the stable, healthy, well-educated and well-off populace that is the true wealth of nations.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Up Your Fucking Ass, Mr. Sexy
The clock says to get moving but I can't. I screw my delicate mousetrap mouth to one side and show my brass stare. Not for nothing I call myself an iceberg. The people I hate are just outside my window.
I want to yell at them, to curse them out. I want to drop marshmallows and watch them splatter with lethal force after the 37 floor Times Square freefall.
But the windows don't open. I'm stuck in this sepulcher, this white man's palace. I sit back and let the phone ring. Voice mail is a very underrated thing.
It's that time of month. That's what my boss says.
He's sure it's that and not impending skin cancer. Or that my tanning lamp burned out. Or that I was badly clawed on my leg by my neighbor's cat which I was taking care of while she was in Bermuda. Or because my favorite neon tetra has been floating upside down near the surface of the fish tank for three days now.
No.
My boss says it's that time of month. That's why he's my boss and not the other way around--because he's a simple charlatan who knows nothing but trusts his gut.
“Call Red Adair,” I tell him. “The oil well's on fire.”
He doesn't say, “Take the day off.”
He says, “What? Like your shit doesn't stink too.”
And I want to shout. Of course it does, you silly man. It stinks on hot ice. You're the one pretending to be perfect, with your Armani suits and your slicked back hair and your immaculate clear polished fingernails. You're the one who thinks he's better than everyone else. You. You, Mister Sexy, you.
But I don't say a word.
Because what angers me is that he's right--it is that time of month. It wasn't supposed to be--not for another eight days according to my regular schedule, which has run like clockwork for two years now--but when one thing goes wrong everything does. The whole damn system breaks down. And then the blood starts flowing. The crowning insult: I'm the Bayonne bleeder. Get me the vacuum cleaner, please.
“Only women bleed,” I tell Eric when I get home.
Of course he has a comeback.
“How about my hemorrhoids?”
And I'm forced to tell him that I don't want to think about his hemorrhoids because that's an everyday thing and asking someone, even your partner, to think about something like that every day is tyranny, is fascism, is oppression, whereas the period, the menses, the brown blood flow, is only once a month and asking someone to be a little considerate once a month is reasonable. Indeed, it's what you should expect of friends. Time to vacuum, Dickhead.
He doesn't say: “I understand. Let me cook you dinner.” Or even: “Can I help you clean?”
He says, “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Which he considers the height of rational discourse.
Sometimes the dude is like a brick wall. There's more responsiveness in a piece of raw meat.
I, on the other hand, am a sponge. Everything leaks because everything in this faulty world must at some point or another lose fluid, it's an unwritten law, and I soak it all up. A blood sandwich. When I was a kid that's what I'd do when we ate meat. Take a piece of white bread--Wonder or Arnold work best--lie it in the juice, and when it was full, soaked to the max, I'd fold it up between my fingers and eat the succulent morsel in one bite. Then I'd lick the running red stuff off my fingers. It was better than Bosco.
When I'm like this, Eric goes to Pittsburgh. Which is to say he doesn't call, doesn't propose a candlelight dinner, doesn't wait for me to call him. He simply digs out his tools and spends his days working with a blowtorch, sweating pipe. Ordinarily he's a graphic artist. When I'm on the rag he's a plumber.
I know he'd like to take that torch to me. A BernzOmatic straight to my borscht belt. He doesn't realize that what I need right now, when I'm groaning and vacuuming and he's monkeying with a hot water heater, is a good roll, a quality lay, a frenzy of fingers all over me. A back rub is not enough. Show me one woman who hasn't at these moments found an excuse to take a hot bath so she could get off on the jetting water flow while her queasy mate sat silently on the bed watching The Price is Right, intimidated by the sheer, unavoidable, natural physicalness of her body. Nice girls do, all the time.
We are, after all, tied to the forces that move the moon and the stars. We are cosmological.
Unfortunately, though, that mystical connection doesn't make it any easier. The philosophers say that with repetition a thing becomes familiar, a part of you. But if more of these western philosophers were women, the whole damn corpus would be different. Kierkegaard and his ilk could hardly deal with the opposite sex. We were the other, the dreaded, the unknowable. “Supposing truth is a woman what then,” wrote Nietzsche. The truth he couldn't handle. A thing beyond good and evil. A bloody thing.
The first time I sent Eric out for tampons, he bought Pampers instead. He said he didn't notice the picture of the baby on the box.
“You don't know anything,” I told him.
He gets rational when he gets angry. He corrected my grammar. “Use proper English,” he said, “The right way to say it is, 'You don't know shit.'” Then he left. That was the start of his monthly disappearances.
It actually didn't matter that he was too embarrassed to buy me my OB's. I used the Pampers anyway. I rolled up one of the diapers and stuffed it in my underwear like a maxi-pad. Talk about roughing it.
Eric doesn't notice much. When I'm pre menstrual I stand in front of the mirror each morning and weigh my breasts, one in each hand. They're so heavy, almost painfully droopy. They scare me. But he has never remarked on it.
He doesn't see the pimple on my forehead or my shoulder that even now, at age 36, comes every month to presage the period.
He remains male, doggedly outside and oblivious. He never breaks out, never gains weight, always wears comfortable clothes, and thinks he looks good without a shirt. So much for justice.
When I have a particularly bloody and painful period, when Eric has disappeared and I'm alone, this is what I do: I save my tampons. I dry them out, let the blood turn brown. Then I send postcards. Each one has a tampon stapled to it by the string.
I call them my monthlies. I send them to certain men I know. I inscribe different sayings on the cards. I have written: “Run for your life. It's a gusher.” I have written, “Warning: If used improperly this device can cause grievous bodily injury.” I have written, “This plug's for you.”
I imagine mailmen throughout the country delivering these missives, holding them gently by the edges so as not to be contaminated. I envision the people who sort the mail refusing to touch my monthlies without rubber gloves.
I have only had one bad reaction--from my sister. She told me my brother in law thought I was being aggressive.
My brother in law's a good man. But I know that aggressive isn't in his vocabulary.
“Was that his word?” I asked.
“No,” she admitted. “What he really said was, 'I like your sister, but she sure can be a ballbuster.'“
I wanted to shout. Of course. I am a ballbuster. Absitively. Posolutely. But only because I've had my balls busted so often myself. Why can men give but not receive? Just what is the deal here?
But I didn't say anything. Sisterhood is powerful, but not that powerful. There is no such thing as solidarity.
When I was a kid, there were icebergs in the Hudson. I saw them from the Jersey side every time we drove over the G.W. Bridge, and I swear my father told me that his father had walked across the river when he was young, because it used to freeze solid. But there are no icebergs anymore. Even in last year's cold snap, the river didn't freeze.
Since I'm almost done with the flow, Eric consents to meet in a bar after work. Eighth Avenue. The neons stain the faces of the people en route to the Port Authority. I stand in the doorway. This is an old men's place. They're watching Jeopardy. The 7 p.m. ritual. I don't find this at all threatening. Guys like getting the answers and trying to guess the questions. Women like giving the answers and not worrying about the questions. We have formalized this in our culture. We call it marriage. We call it relationship. We call it the war between men and women. Jeopardy, in a larger sense.
“What is Kashmir,” the toothless guy at the head of the bar shouts, and everyone nods.
Eric is wearing his Mister Sexy shirt, the one he always leaves unbuttoned one button too far, to show off his chest hair. He's watching TV too.
“What is Macedonia,” Eric shouts. Countries for $200.
He's put himself in this line up. The male fashion show. Guys in jean jackets with hair a la mode thinning but pulled back into a pony tail drinking beer and calling out their responses to an insane TV quiz show, bonding without talking about anything at all.
And I realize that's the point. Eric wants me to choose him. To supply the question to his answer each time: do I recognize him, do I think he's sexy, do I love him.
What would he do if I walked up to some other guy the greasy guy with the paunch sitting next to him, for instance and gave him a tongue kiss? What would he do if I sucked on the guy's neck, Dracula style, and ran my fingers through his hair?
But, of course, I don't do any of that.
This is what I do: I walk up to Eric, down the remainder of his pint beer, and before he can say his usual, casual, super cool, “Hey, babe,” I say, so loud it projects beyond Jeopardy and for all I know beyond the bar and out into the street, “Up your fucking ass, Mister Sexy.”
As I slide onto the stool on the other side of Eric from the fat guy, I'm electric. Eric notices who couldn't and doesn't say anything. His pulse chimes the seconds in his neck. I'm glowing. My nails are redder than the coating on a candy apple. My jacket, and my bustier underneath it, are ruddier than a fresh piece of meat. My lips and cheeks are rosier than a blushing bride. My proud flesh is phosphorescent.
“Sometimes you are so rotten,” Eric finally splutters, and unwittingly speaks the words of the ages. For I am rotten. Women always have been. I curdle cream. I sour milk. I make good meat turn bad. I am the spoiler, the carrier of rot and fermentation and degradation. And yet, at the same time, I am the red cross, the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization.
I just sit there, and Eric disappears and the whole bar disappears. I am brighter than the neons and darker than the moon, hotter than strong acid and colder than any iceberg.
“What is bleeding,” I shout. In the distance, everyone applauds. It's the right answer to the Daily Double and I win a bourbon and a beer.
I want to yell at them, to curse them out. I want to drop marshmallows and watch them splatter with lethal force after the 37 floor Times Square freefall.
But the windows don't open. I'm stuck in this sepulcher, this white man's palace. I sit back and let the phone ring. Voice mail is a very underrated thing.
It's that time of month. That's what my boss says.
He's sure it's that and not impending skin cancer. Or that my tanning lamp burned out. Or that I was badly clawed on my leg by my neighbor's cat which I was taking care of while she was in Bermuda. Or because my favorite neon tetra has been floating upside down near the surface of the fish tank for three days now.
No.
My boss says it's that time of month. That's why he's my boss and not the other way around--because he's a simple charlatan who knows nothing but trusts his gut.
“Call Red Adair,” I tell him. “The oil well's on fire.”
He doesn't say, “Take the day off.”
He says, “What? Like your shit doesn't stink too.”
And I want to shout. Of course it does, you silly man. It stinks on hot ice. You're the one pretending to be perfect, with your Armani suits and your slicked back hair and your immaculate clear polished fingernails. You're the one who thinks he's better than everyone else. You. You, Mister Sexy, you.
But I don't say a word.
Because what angers me is that he's right--it is that time of month. It wasn't supposed to be--not for another eight days according to my regular schedule, which has run like clockwork for two years now--but when one thing goes wrong everything does. The whole damn system breaks down. And then the blood starts flowing. The crowning insult: I'm the Bayonne bleeder. Get me the vacuum cleaner, please.
“Only women bleed,” I tell Eric when I get home.
Of course he has a comeback.
“How about my hemorrhoids?”
And I'm forced to tell him that I don't want to think about his hemorrhoids because that's an everyday thing and asking someone, even your partner, to think about something like that every day is tyranny, is fascism, is oppression, whereas the period, the menses, the brown blood flow, is only once a month and asking someone to be a little considerate once a month is reasonable. Indeed, it's what you should expect of friends. Time to vacuum, Dickhead.
He doesn't say: “I understand. Let me cook you dinner.” Or even: “Can I help you clean?”
He says, “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Which he considers the height of rational discourse.
Sometimes the dude is like a brick wall. There's more responsiveness in a piece of raw meat.
I, on the other hand, am a sponge. Everything leaks because everything in this faulty world must at some point or another lose fluid, it's an unwritten law, and I soak it all up. A blood sandwich. When I was a kid that's what I'd do when we ate meat. Take a piece of white bread--Wonder or Arnold work best--lie it in the juice, and when it was full, soaked to the max, I'd fold it up between my fingers and eat the succulent morsel in one bite. Then I'd lick the running red stuff off my fingers. It was better than Bosco.
When I'm like this, Eric goes to Pittsburgh. Which is to say he doesn't call, doesn't propose a candlelight dinner, doesn't wait for me to call him. He simply digs out his tools and spends his days working with a blowtorch, sweating pipe. Ordinarily he's a graphic artist. When I'm on the rag he's a plumber.
I know he'd like to take that torch to me. A BernzOmatic straight to my borscht belt. He doesn't realize that what I need right now, when I'm groaning and vacuuming and he's monkeying with a hot water heater, is a good roll, a quality lay, a frenzy of fingers all over me. A back rub is not enough. Show me one woman who hasn't at these moments found an excuse to take a hot bath so she could get off on the jetting water flow while her queasy mate sat silently on the bed watching The Price is Right, intimidated by the sheer, unavoidable, natural physicalness of her body. Nice girls do, all the time.
We are, after all, tied to the forces that move the moon and the stars. We are cosmological.
Unfortunately, though, that mystical connection doesn't make it any easier. The philosophers say that with repetition a thing becomes familiar, a part of you. But if more of these western philosophers were women, the whole damn corpus would be different. Kierkegaard and his ilk could hardly deal with the opposite sex. We were the other, the dreaded, the unknowable. “Supposing truth is a woman what then,” wrote Nietzsche. The truth he couldn't handle. A thing beyond good and evil. A bloody thing.
The first time I sent Eric out for tampons, he bought Pampers instead. He said he didn't notice the picture of the baby on the box.
“You don't know anything,” I told him.
He gets rational when he gets angry. He corrected my grammar. “Use proper English,” he said, “The right way to say it is, 'You don't know shit.'” Then he left. That was the start of his monthly disappearances.
It actually didn't matter that he was too embarrassed to buy me my OB's. I used the Pampers anyway. I rolled up one of the diapers and stuffed it in my underwear like a maxi-pad. Talk about roughing it.
Eric doesn't notice much. When I'm pre menstrual I stand in front of the mirror each morning and weigh my breasts, one in each hand. They're so heavy, almost painfully droopy. They scare me. But he has never remarked on it.
He doesn't see the pimple on my forehead or my shoulder that even now, at age 36, comes every month to presage the period.
He remains male, doggedly outside and oblivious. He never breaks out, never gains weight, always wears comfortable clothes, and thinks he looks good without a shirt. So much for justice.
When I have a particularly bloody and painful period, when Eric has disappeared and I'm alone, this is what I do: I save my tampons. I dry them out, let the blood turn brown. Then I send postcards. Each one has a tampon stapled to it by the string.
I call them my monthlies. I send them to certain men I know. I inscribe different sayings on the cards. I have written: “Run for your life. It's a gusher.” I have written, “Warning: If used improperly this device can cause grievous bodily injury.” I have written, “This plug's for you.”
I imagine mailmen throughout the country delivering these missives, holding them gently by the edges so as not to be contaminated. I envision the people who sort the mail refusing to touch my monthlies without rubber gloves.
I have only had one bad reaction--from my sister. She told me my brother in law thought I was being aggressive.
My brother in law's a good man. But I know that aggressive isn't in his vocabulary.
“Was that his word?” I asked.
“No,” she admitted. “What he really said was, 'I like your sister, but she sure can be a ballbuster.'“
I wanted to shout. Of course. I am a ballbuster. Absitively. Posolutely. But only because I've had my balls busted so often myself. Why can men give but not receive? Just what is the deal here?
But I didn't say anything. Sisterhood is powerful, but not that powerful. There is no such thing as solidarity.
When I was a kid, there were icebergs in the Hudson. I saw them from the Jersey side every time we drove over the G.W. Bridge, and I swear my father told me that his father had walked across the river when he was young, because it used to freeze solid. But there are no icebergs anymore. Even in last year's cold snap, the river didn't freeze.
Since I'm almost done with the flow, Eric consents to meet in a bar after work. Eighth Avenue. The neons stain the faces of the people en route to the Port Authority. I stand in the doorway. This is an old men's place. They're watching Jeopardy. The 7 p.m. ritual. I don't find this at all threatening. Guys like getting the answers and trying to guess the questions. Women like giving the answers and not worrying about the questions. We have formalized this in our culture. We call it marriage. We call it relationship. We call it the war between men and women. Jeopardy, in a larger sense.
“What is Kashmir,” the toothless guy at the head of the bar shouts, and everyone nods.
Eric is wearing his Mister Sexy shirt, the one he always leaves unbuttoned one button too far, to show off his chest hair. He's watching TV too.
“What is Macedonia,” Eric shouts. Countries for $200.
He's put himself in this line up. The male fashion show. Guys in jean jackets with hair a la mode thinning but pulled back into a pony tail drinking beer and calling out their responses to an insane TV quiz show, bonding without talking about anything at all.
And I realize that's the point. Eric wants me to choose him. To supply the question to his answer each time: do I recognize him, do I think he's sexy, do I love him.
What would he do if I walked up to some other guy the greasy guy with the paunch sitting next to him, for instance and gave him a tongue kiss? What would he do if I sucked on the guy's neck, Dracula style, and ran my fingers through his hair?
But, of course, I don't do any of that.
This is what I do: I walk up to Eric, down the remainder of his pint beer, and before he can say his usual, casual, super cool, “Hey, babe,” I say, so loud it projects beyond Jeopardy and for all I know beyond the bar and out into the street, “Up your fucking ass, Mister Sexy.”
As I slide onto the stool on the other side of Eric from the fat guy, I'm electric. Eric notices who couldn't and doesn't say anything. His pulse chimes the seconds in his neck. I'm glowing. My nails are redder than the coating on a candy apple. My jacket, and my bustier underneath it, are ruddier than a fresh piece of meat. My lips and cheeks are rosier than a blushing bride. My proud flesh is phosphorescent.
“Sometimes you are so rotten,” Eric finally splutters, and unwittingly speaks the words of the ages. For I am rotten. Women always have been. I curdle cream. I sour milk. I make good meat turn bad. I am the spoiler, the carrier of rot and fermentation and degradation. And yet, at the same time, I am the red cross, the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization.
I just sit there, and Eric disappears and the whole bar disappears. I am brighter than the neons and darker than the moon, hotter than strong acid and colder than any iceberg.
“What is bleeding,” I shout. In the distance, everyone applauds. It's the right answer to the Daily Double and I win a bourbon and a beer.
Radio Controlled Planes
Sherma watches her father.
“Rafael,” her mother says.
He holds up a hand. He doesn’t have to talk.
He’s tinkering with a wing, so intent he can’t be disturbed. It got bent, last weekend, mangled by a tree when it suddenly lost lift.
“Sherma, don’t bother your father,” her mother says.
Sherma was just looking at his arms. Like banisters, she thinks, meant to hold things up. She admires the way they cradle the broken wooden struts. But she knows not to say anything. The wing, right now, is the only important thing.
Sherma turns and goes into her room. Behind her, she hears her mother: “Rafael.”
Sherma knows, from the safe haven of her bed, that her father has her mother’s head out the window.
He doesn’t say anything.
But Sherma gets the message.
Any time, any place, anyhow, for any reason.
In the morning, her mother has a scarf tied stylishly around her neck. But her eyes give away the lie.
“He threw her in a pond,” Sherma announces to her friend Connie. “Last night.”
Connie shakes her head. “What pond.”
“I dreamed it,” Sherma says. “He threw her in from the third floor and she was floating, head down in the weeds with all her hair spread out. Then he walked away.”
Her mother has fixed dinner but her father wants none of it. He’s standing in the living room sandpapering the epoxy he applied to the wing. There’s white dust sticking to the hair on his arms. He brushes it into a little pile on the coffee table.
“Sherma, be quiet,” her mother says. But the only noise she made was the soft puck of her eyelids as she blinked back tears.
When she was little, Sherma remembers, he wiped her eyes when she cried. She was just a baby, but she can recall his handkerchief, almost as big as her body, and the way it felt against her skin, and his knobby hand moving towards her, smelling slightly of gasoline.
He takes her with him to meet the guys out by Rodman’s Neck, and Sherma sees one plane go out of control. “No no no no,” the guy who owns it shouts. “Sweet mother of God, no.” He jams on the joystick but the plane refuses to respond. It has a mind of its own and just flies away.
Suddenly, he’s running after it, across the parking lot and into the field by the bay. He’s up to his chest in weeds and water before the other men catch him. Silently all the men watch the plane shoot skyward and disappear.
“It’ll keep going till it runs out of gas,” her father tells her.
The men make puddles in the car on the way home. None of them talk.
Sherma dreams that she throws her father’s plane out the window and it hovers in the air, like a hummingbird. Just stays there in the air outside her window and waits for her and her mother to climb in.
Sherma and her mother are in the plane as it breaks free of her father’s control. They soar across the vast blue. Her father is underneath, cursing, and chasing them. She squeezes her mother tight. They fly higher and higher towards the clouds, so high they never have to come down.
Sherma sits at her mother’s feet.
“I want a turn on the dance floor with the most beautiful woman in the room.” Her mother, who loves to dance, shakes her head, so Uncle Nick takes Sherma. Like her father his fingers smell like gasoline.
When the song’s over she steps away without even a thank you. Her father, she sees, is at the bar surveying the scene. Sherma knows he will not ask her mother to dance, even though she wore her green dress, the one that clings to her body without a wrinkle. He sees her looking at him and turns away.
There’s a special landing strip on the deep blue, strong enough to support a plane. It touches down on the rolling surface, settles, and then slowly sinks. But the river is warm.
Sherma feels the pulse of her father’s tears and knows immediately that something dreadful has happened, that instead of taking off, the plane crash landed on the living room floor.
Her father wraps her in a blanket and, cradling her in his arms as gently as he held the broken wing, steps out the window and they drop into the cool night.
Her mother looms out the window and points.
“Go to your father,” she says.
Sherma shakes her head and her mother falls.
Next, her mother pricks her with a safety pin and laughs.
As they drive home, her father and mother don’t talk. Sherma wants to scream, to tell her father to stop. Just stop the car and get out. She wants her father and mother to walk away, hand-in-hand, and in her mind she watches them disappear into the future, where they will be happy, without her.
When they get home, her father scowls and takes up the wing. He needs to attach it to the plane.
“Shhh,” her mother hisses, but Sherma hasn’t said a word all night. Her mother pinches her hard on the leg and she goes to her room.
And, from the darkness under her covers, Sherma rubs her leg and knows what she will do.
Later, after another episode with the window, Sherma hears her father and mother go to bed. She waits for a while, making sure the house is still, then goes to the basement. She pulls out the black plastic bag in which her father keeps his favorite plane. He’s painted it beautifully, with perfect World War I decals and camouflage coloring. She gives the propeller a soft twist, then puts the plane to one side and pulls the bag over her head. It’s dark inside and smells like chemicals. She’s the prize possession now, gone flapping away as her father gives chase into the weeds and emerges covered with slime. Sherma wriggles down to the bottom and breathes in the steamy darkness and shudders as she soars over a bright new world of lipstick lawns and nail polish houses and sunlight glinting off her mother’s man-made gap-toothed smile.
“Rafael,” her mother says.
He holds up a hand. He doesn’t have to talk.
He’s tinkering with a wing, so intent he can’t be disturbed. It got bent, last weekend, mangled by a tree when it suddenly lost lift.
“Sherma, don’t bother your father,” her mother says.
Sherma was just looking at his arms. Like banisters, she thinks, meant to hold things up. She admires the way they cradle the broken wooden struts. But she knows not to say anything. The wing, right now, is the only important thing.
Sherma turns and goes into her room. Behind her, she hears her mother: “Rafael.”
Sherma knows, from the safe haven of her bed, that her father has her mother’s head out the window.
He doesn’t say anything.
But Sherma gets the message.
Any time, any place, anyhow, for any reason.
In the morning, her mother has a scarf tied stylishly around her neck. But her eyes give away the lie.
“He threw her in a pond,” Sherma announces to her friend Connie. “Last night.”
Connie shakes her head. “What pond.”
“I dreamed it,” Sherma says. “He threw her in from the third floor and she was floating, head down in the weeds with all her hair spread out. Then he walked away.”
Her mother has fixed dinner but her father wants none of it. He’s standing in the living room sandpapering the epoxy he applied to the wing. There’s white dust sticking to the hair on his arms. He brushes it into a little pile on the coffee table.
“Sherma, be quiet,” her mother says. But the only noise she made was the soft puck of her eyelids as she blinked back tears.
When she was little, Sherma remembers, he wiped her eyes when she cried. She was just a baby, but she can recall his handkerchief, almost as big as her body, and the way it felt against her skin, and his knobby hand moving towards her, smelling slightly of gasoline.
He takes her with him to meet the guys out by Rodman’s Neck, and Sherma sees one plane go out of control. “No no no no,” the guy who owns it shouts. “Sweet mother of God, no.” He jams on the joystick but the plane refuses to respond. It has a mind of its own and just flies away.
Suddenly, he’s running after it, across the parking lot and into the field by the bay. He’s up to his chest in weeds and water before the other men catch him. Silently all the men watch the plane shoot skyward and disappear.
“It’ll keep going till it runs out of gas,” her father tells her.
The men make puddles in the car on the way home. None of them talk.
Sherma dreams that she throws her father’s plane out the window and it hovers in the air, like a hummingbird. Just stays there in the air outside her window and waits for her and her mother to climb in.
Sherma and her mother are in the plane as it breaks free of her father’s control. They soar across the vast blue. Her father is underneath, cursing, and chasing them. She squeezes her mother tight. They fly higher and higher towards the clouds, so high they never have to come down.
Sherma sits at her mother’s feet.
“I want a turn on the dance floor with the most beautiful woman in the room.” Her mother, who loves to dance, shakes her head, so Uncle Nick takes Sherma. Like her father his fingers smell like gasoline.
When the song’s over she steps away without even a thank you. Her father, she sees, is at the bar surveying the scene. Sherma knows he will not ask her mother to dance, even though she wore her green dress, the one that clings to her body without a wrinkle. He sees her looking at him and turns away.
There’s a special landing strip on the deep blue, strong enough to support a plane. It touches down on the rolling surface, settles, and then slowly sinks. But the river is warm.
Sherma feels the pulse of her father’s tears and knows immediately that something dreadful has happened, that instead of taking off, the plane crash landed on the living room floor.
Her father wraps her in a blanket and, cradling her in his arms as gently as he held the broken wing, steps out the window and they drop into the cool night.
Her mother looms out the window and points.
“Go to your father,” she says.
Sherma shakes her head and her mother falls.
Next, her mother pricks her with a safety pin and laughs.
As they drive home, her father and mother don’t talk. Sherma wants to scream, to tell her father to stop. Just stop the car and get out. She wants her father and mother to walk away, hand-in-hand, and in her mind she watches them disappear into the future, where they will be happy, without her.
When they get home, her father scowls and takes up the wing. He needs to attach it to the plane.
“Shhh,” her mother hisses, but Sherma hasn’t said a word all night. Her mother pinches her hard on the leg and she goes to her room.
And, from the darkness under her covers, Sherma rubs her leg and knows what she will do.
Later, after another episode with the window, Sherma hears her father and mother go to bed. She waits for a while, making sure the house is still, then goes to the basement. She pulls out the black plastic bag in which her father keeps his favorite plane. He’s painted it beautifully, with perfect World War I decals and camouflage coloring. She gives the propeller a soft twist, then puts the plane to one side and pulls the bag over her head. It’s dark inside and smells like chemicals. She’s the prize possession now, gone flapping away as her father gives chase into the weeds and emerges covered with slime. Sherma wriggles down to the bottom and breathes in the steamy darkness and shudders as she soars over a bright new world of lipstick lawns and nail polish houses and sunlight glinting off her mother’s man-made gap-toothed smile.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Drag Queen at Home
Freshie looks in the mirror.
Oh God, he says.
Old man says: What’s the matter.
I got a hair, Freshie says.
Everyone’s got hair.
A really long gross one, like 13 inches long, on my face.
Shit.
You got a razor.
Forget razors, honey. They make your skin all rough. Tweezers.
Fuck that. I am not gonna puck my face like I’m a chicken.
Let me see.
No. You go away. I want a razor.
Big man gonna shave.
What gets me is, was it here yesterday. Coiled up so everyone could see.
No one’s looking.
Like a rope right on my face. Like a snake.
Freshie.
A goddamned reptile. A dinosaur.
Freshie.
A monster.
Freshie, look at me.
Freshie stares that sullen stare.
You use powder, he says.
Oh, the insults I put up with.
You gotta paint your face red because you got no color. And all that base all over your face to act like you don’t have wrinkles. It’s disgusting. Be who you are.
Freshie.
Yeah.
You done?
Yeah.
This is who I am. Got that.
The kid stares again.
See: the one with the lipstick and the powder and no wrinkles. That’s me. The other, that’s just this temporary thing. This body. This thing I inhabit. But this, the way I make myself seem: that’s me.
Freshie blinks. The old man looks straight into his flat black eyes. What the hell goes on in there?
How’s that work, being what you aren’t and becoming what you want to be, but it’s not for real. How’s that go? Like to always want to be what you’re not and try to be what you can’t always be.
That’s what the old man wants him to say. But Freshie doesn’t have words for this stuff. He just looks at the old man in the mirror, watches him apply the clown-like eyeliner and the false lashes and the extensions to his nails and the exaggerated, bloated red to his lips. But he doesn’t wonder about all that. He wonders how he got that strange hair on his face and why his friend the old man didn’t want him to use a razor and why it feels like a door that was open just got closed and the room is suddenly surprisingly cold.
Oh God, he says.
Old man says: What’s the matter.
I got a hair, Freshie says.
Everyone’s got hair.
A really long gross one, like 13 inches long, on my face.
Shit.
You got a razor.
Forget razors, honey. They make your skin all rough. Tweezers.
Fuck that. I am not gonna puck my face like I’m a chicken.
Let me see.
No. You go away. I want a razor.
Big man gonna shave.
What gets me is, was it here yesterday. Coiled up so everyone could see.
No one’s looking.
Like a rope right on my face. Like a snake.
Freshie.
A goddamned reptile. A dinosaur.
Freshie.
A monster.
Freshie, look at me.
Freshie stares that sullen stare.
You use powder, he says.
Oh, the insults I put up with.
You gotta paint your face red because you got no color. And all that base all over your face to act like you don’t have wrinkles. It’s disgusting. Be who you are.
Freshie.
Yeah.
You done?
Yeah.
This is who I am. Got that.
The kid stares again.
See: the one with the lipstick and the powder and no wrinkles. That’s me. The other, that’s just this temporary thing. This body. This thing I inhabit. But this, the way I make myself seem: that’s me.
Freshie blinks. The old man looks straight into his flat black eyes. What the hell goes on in there?
How’s that work, being what you aren’t and becoming what you want to be, but it’s not for real. How’s that go? Like to always want to be what you’re not and try to be what you can’t always be.
That’s what the old man wants him to say. But Freshie doesn’t have words for this stuff. He just looks at the old man in the mirror, watches him apply the clown-like eyeliner and the false lashes and the extensions to his nails and the exaggerated, bloated red to his lips. But he doesn’t wonder about all that. He wonders how he got that strange hair on his face and why his friend the old man didn’t want him to use a razor and why it feels like a door that was open just got closed and the room is suddenly surprisingly cold.
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