hot pink and fingertips
"You gotta barrel through," she says. "It's egocentric to be sad. You have to stop thinking so much about yourself. You have to think about, you know. All those Poor People. It's not about YOU all the time. That's what I told her."
(Her daughter might conceivably be sad, just a few months past her Event. A big event. The kind of event that makes me feel protective of her despite not knowing her well. We'd asked how she's doing, and there it was.)
I open and close my mouth a few times. Justin murmurs agreement for the sake of removing ourselves as neatly as possible. He takes my hand and we walk down the grass toward the wharf. We stand with our backs to the water, facing the house, a wraparound porch overflowing with pearls, khaki pants, and yacht club insignias.
It still hangs in the air above us. Egocentric. I need someone else to say something. I've said enough. I try lamely to push past it.
"Look at all that beige. Do you think there's anybody interesting up there? Do you think there are any criminals up there?"
He says nothing, contemplating the people on the porch. In those moments, Justin's always piped up in a diffusing way. Never mind that or Look I see an eagle and it's got something in its mouth. He's quiet. He doesn't tend to... be about himself. This leaves me to be about myself all by myself.
I sip wine from a rented glass. I can't say a single word. I'm overwhelmed with wanting to say to her daughter Hey I just made soup. It's a selfish Tunisian recipe with roasted tomatoes and peanuts. Come on over. Justin speaks.
"Do you ever wish you had Tourette's syndrome?"
I startle.
"I mean, like, F-FUCKYOO!!"
A mouthful of Pinot Grigio goes down the wrong pipe. I cough and laugh too loudly. Three people turn around. He does it again like he needs to, and I'm so grateful that he needs to, and I double over.
"F-F-FUCKYOO!! FUCKYOO!!"
+++
In New York City I stood there a while and stared.
I told him I felt kind of obligated to show up at BlogHer's Grief and the Internet panel. He stared back at me. I told him that it might feel a bit like... I don't know. It's hard to articulate. Like a circle jerk. Which is ironic. Maybe I just didn't want to be in a room full of women sobbing at the spectacle of it all, at the mere proximity of trauma. Not that I mind that they do. Maybe I didn't feel like uncorking all that just then. Maybe I was afraid of sitting there stone-faced. Maybe I'm a cynic who thinks too much. I asked him if he knew what a circle jerk was. He said nothing.
He looked like a complex man. Dark but the kind you can't tear away from, not ever. I wondered if, perhaps, he was sad. If he didn't spend enough time contemplating plights. You know. Punjabi slums and Sudanese clitori and harpooned whales. Plights that might have elevated him beyond the selfishness of his own pain. I wondered if he lacked a rich woman to remind him.
He said nothing. He just stared back at me, a match.
+++
In New York City, everything struck me as art. Women with short skirts and butterscotch legs. Suicidal yellow taxis. People yelling and horns honking, in a hurry, in the deepest middle of the night. New York made me hungry for input. Strangely, I didn't spend much time seeking that input at the conference. I just wanted my friends, and interesting things to stare at with them. I felt meta-averse. I was a bottomless pit for handmade ravioli.
In Soho, shops and bakeries and corner vegetable stores have little conveyor belts that open up onto the streets like storm cellars, steep chutes for deliveries. Resident cats pad up and down, twining around passing legs, shedding.
I don't know anything about art. And so I watched people react to it. Looking for cues, maybe. I'll admit to that. It was like being in church. There's a way you move along. A grace you give someone in the midst of being upheaved. You shuffle around a lot. You sit down, stand up. You feel stirred and expansive despite a lack of academic context.
Pain and abuse and sex and loss and anger and hunger and confusion and wealth and labour and the way it feels when some celestial fingertip reaches out and taps you on the top of the head and zaps you all the way down to your feet with something larger than what you already know of yourself. That's what I saw.
People stand in front of art summoning that fingertip, aching for it. Walls hung with wanting and hurt of epic proportions.
It was beautiful.
Too beautiful to barrel through.
New York gave me vertigo.
Me and miss Maggie Dammit. Thank you, schmutzie.
New York gave me friends, again, people I'm still trying to explain to Justin. She's so... they're... it's not... he's... I can't. So I don't speak much. I just walk around and smile, all full up.
Some of those people are in pictures here. One of them isn't - he squirms out of frame. I landed at JFK, dropped my bags off at the hotel, and went to The Gap to get fitted for a few new outfits. Then I went to Soho and Ryan shot photos. It was surreal, and incredible to watch him work. There's more to come of it, we hope. But then there always is, when it comes to him. He's a creative entrepreneur, like so many others that gathered in New York.
Being with these people is so invigorating. They're writers and photographers and artists. They counteract beige, every single one of them, and I can't ever seem to get enough.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Reader Comments (38)
And these pictures make me nostalgic for New York, a city I was so happy to leave yet love to return to with frequency...and then leave again after five or six days.
I wish I were kidding, but after a couple of beers I will not be able to stop myself.
Also: post = excellent. Your writing is like asparagus-and-ricotta stuffed ravioli.
i adore that city - it has it's own pulse.
overjoyed you got to experience that longing and heartbeat of magical NYC.
William, God accepts Visa. And all it takes to counteract beige is a hot pink dress. You're not in the military, are you?
Leigh, it's been too long. I've missed you.
Miss you, fair lady.
That's pretty much the best definition of art I've heard in a long time. And, also, the way your writing often makes me feel.
Thank you.
This is the only post I've read about BlogHer that makes me sad I wasn't there. And you KNOW how I feel about large gatherings of people I've never met.
Incidentally, I'm finally reading Dread Crew to Isaac. He LOVES it. Always makes me read two chapters in a sitting and is laughing in all the right spots. He's got a crush on you, now. I need you to sign my copy for him, 'kay?
glad you like my adopted home town
someday.
Love you so.
xo
New York makes me feel more alive -- hungry for input, yes, truly.
Next time I'm lucky enough to be in the same city as you, I'll be braver and do more than a chicken-out fly-by at your book signing.
that he took your hand to walk away with you. the tourette's 'fuck you' seems incidental after that.
the circle jerk. uh, long long story there...happens to be a nickname of mine. long long story and actually as clean as the showering together.
your ny kicks my ny's ass. it just does. i kinda realize it always will because words bend at your will. it is really quite amazing. like you.
xo, a
kinda sad i didn't find the guts to go this year. maybe 11 is my number!
I miss New York a lot! It's really like no other place I've been. I felt very small but also kind of important in New York, which doesn't make much sense at all, but I'm not finding a whole lot of things that do, so, I'll roll with it.
Glad you had a great time. :) I'm most interested to find out if you went home with SWAG (which Michael Scott says is "Stuff We All Get").
xo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/suebobdavis/4889769494/in/set-72157624700209682
first the beige people - I recognize them. they make me want to pierce inappropriate parts of my face just so I may never be mistaken for one of them. just for the pleasure of creating a fissure in that scotch-on-the-rocks teeth and pearls smile.
new york - vertigo indeed. the art, oh yes. and the finger of god. i stood before a canvas recently and felt that current when I least expected to feel so like a harp string, plucked.
the conference - makes me all kinds of shy. just reading about being there. I cringe at the thought of the pictures, the presenting, introducing, explaining, (never mind the roomfull of grief & the internet. oof. that is a whole other stratosphere of public self-conscious), choosing the dress, the words.
what I would be there for - might one day try to be present for - is the in-the-fleshness of conversations. meeting the people you already kinda know you'd pull out the best guest sheets for.
pretty sure you are one of those. and for Justin, I'd also make sure to have beer in the fridge. what a wonderful story. thank you as always for sharing your beautiful version.
OMG, yes.
Just as you are.
A coworker of mine (my favorite) was telling me about how she met some removed family member of a friend at a family birthday party whose Tourette's manifested not in FuckYous, but in "You're beautiful." Perhaps not as fun as FUCK YOU, but perhaps with a side of snark, you'd be in business while not getting thrown out of the country club.
bah. I'm high on oven cleaner and sunshine. This was an epic fucking post.
And watch the South Park episode where Cartman pretends to have Tourettes. You'll enjoy, and possibly use the ammo for another egocentric woman.