jigsaw jones

comics, reportage, Ben/John Jones

March, 2006. I actually plan to pitch this somewhere. I know, I know, I'm such an idealistic young kid...
edit: this will appear in the July issue of the Comics Journal (as if by magic). really, I'm not lying.

John Jones plugs in the light under the hand painted sign outside his store so passersby can read: “jigsaw. affordable art, shoestring media, zines and comics, obscure bands.” Then he starts to get ready for his last party. It’s cold this weekend, and the radiator is wheezing and rattling as he straightens the books on the shelves, re-stocks the bar, takes out the trash. He sighs when he starts and finishes each task, as he resigns himself to the idea, then is relieved when it’s finished. Jones, 31, is a little goofy and childlike, with a baby face and dimples, and a mess of wavy brown hair that he yanks straight up in a fist when he’s concentrating. You might expect a comics store owner to be kind of greasy, with long hair and a dirty T-shirt, but Jones dresses up for work: thick-rimmed glasses, button-up shirts, nice slacks and wingtips – even though work is just upstairs. He sleeps in the shop’s basement, just below the retail space. It’s the only way he could afford to have his dream store in New York City. “It was always kind of a weird thing that I wanted to do,” he says. “I had all of these different interests, and I thought, why don’t I just try to combine them all? Hence the name.”
Jigsaw is an expression of his personal vision, the piecing together of different parts of his life in a unique way. It’s part small-press comics store, indie novel and magazine shop, art gallery, concert venue, open bar and sometimes living room. Or rather, it was. Now the metal gate below the hand painted sign at 526 East 11th Street is down and locked. The lukewarm response to the store and the high cost of living in New York have forced John Jones and Jigsaw to move to Durham, North Carolina at the beginning of April.
“I thought, why not just go somewhere and get a cheaper, bigger place in a city that is perhaps in need of a little more blue in their red?” He pauses. “Where I could make it more purple at least.” He wanted to find a place without a comics store, where he could make a difference in the local culture without having to teach people what a comic is – and where he could afford the space for a broader inventory and his own apartment. He found a prime location in the Durham “Anti-Mall,” a converted warehouse that already houses a vintage clothing and furniture store, a coffee shop and a concert venue. He didn’t even have to ask the owners: as soon as he mentioned he ran a comics shop in New York, they pointed to an empty stall and suggested he move to Durham. He needed only the afternoon to decide – yes. “It was fate saying, yeaah, okay,” he says, gesturing with his hands and smiling. “Go.”
His last weekend in New York, February 24 and 25, is a relatively tame ending to Jigsaw’s geek chic history of late nights fueled by liquor, art and indie rock. The store’s closing coincides with the first New York Comic-Con, which means two back to back book releases and industry types filling Jigsaw on its last Friday and Saturday nights. A few fans are still convinced the move is some elaborate April Fool’s joke, that come the first, John Jones will roll up the metal gate on Jigsaw around noon as usual. Others are just sad, annoyed, both. There’s nothing like this in New York, they say: it’s not a pristine Soho gallery, or nerdy comics shop, or dingy indie rock venue, or East Village watering hole in the wall. It’s not really anything they’ve seen before. And he was just gaining momentum. “I don’t see this as ‘the end’ like they do,” he says. “One of the reasons I did the shop in the first place was to show people it could be done.” With only a little research into business structure, a short-term lease, and some start-up capital, Jones thinks, anyone could open their own shop. “It just takes being stupid enough to actually do it.”
But instead he seems to have proven that it can’t be done, that it’s virtually impossible for even the most driven and visionary impresario to pull off a project like this in New York City.

John Jones refers to the Durham move as “the move back south”: he grew up in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, where his mother still lives. He’s more comfortable in the South than in New York City, where he moved on a whim in 2003, after a rough divorce. He didn’t quite know what his next step would be. He’d worked at Barnes and Noble, made his own mini comics and paintings, wrote three novels for National Novel Writing Month. There was too much he wanted to do. He finally decided to bring all of his passions together, and in the process, bridge the gap between creators and fans by hosting events where the two could mingle. In June ’04, Jigsaw was born.
The space is tiny – only about 50 people can cram in at a time without suffocating – but Jones somehow makes it aptly comfortable and homey. There’s a black leather couch by the shelves, and the register counter in the back doubles as a bar for parties. He chooses the stock for the store based on his own personal preferences. There’s nothing on the shelves that he hasn’t read at least once – most, several times. “It’s kind of a weird trust exercise to ask someone to spend 12, 15, 20 dollars on something they might not like just because it’s what I’ve handpicked,” he says. For that reason, he avoids the hard sell. At most, if he notices a customer is lingering a while and seems interested in the products, he’ll try to play matchmaker, asking what their favorite books and comics are and trying to find something he thinks they’ll like. “I’ve only had one person bring something back and say they really didn’t care for it.”
But the daytime sales are only a piece of Jigsaw. Jones has hosted pumpkin carvings and film debuts, along with the requisite book release parties and art openings – one complete with a go-go dancer. When the shop first opened, he hosted open mic ‘Jigsawlons.’ There were even small concerts, despite all odds. “We had to tip the couch up on end just to fit them in.” Some of the parties drew up to 300 people, filling Jigsaw for five solid hours as the crowd rotated in and out of the shop. Throughout the past two years, he’s brought nearly every kind of art into the space at one point or another. And the events in turn brought in the bulk of the store’s customers: they were drunk and their inhibitions were down, and Jones didn’t need the hard sell to get them to buy some comics or artwork.
In its first month, Jigsaw turned a profit. But ever since then, sales have been steadily slipping. Businesses across the East Village have taken a hit, and many of the independent stores that sprung up optimistically after 9/11 are cutting back their hours or closing altogether. “The neighborhood got too big for its britches. It tried to become Greenwich Village,” he says. “Now it’s economically impossible to succeed unless you’re a bar.” Jones says it’s gotten even worse in the last six months: most days go by without any customers. The product stopped moving, and the problem became self-perpetuating: when stock is stale, the most loyal patrons don’t come by as often to see what’s new. Even the events aren’t bringing in the sales they once did. Lately there’s been an increase in small donations from people who feel guilty that they can’t afford to buy a piece of art or even a book, but don’t want to just take the free alcohol.
The last two walk-in customers come Friday evening, the second to last day of Jigsaw New York. When Jones sees them, he calls out hello and nonchalantly makes his way to the back of the store behind the register/bar counter. The customers, two hipster guys in head to toe black, flip through the comics for nearly fifteen minutes. One of them reads an entire book. “This is great,” he comments to no one in particular. “I should get it for my sister.” But instead he checks his watch and reminds his friend that they have to meet someone at a nearby bar. As they leave, he calls out “Thank you.” Jones responds, “We’re having some events here later tonight if you’re interested.”
“Events?” The hipster looks confused.
“From 8 to 11, a book release, open bar.”
“Oh, okay,” the hipster says, still puzzled. “Thanks.” They don’t come back.

Jigsaw begins to fill up a few hours later with editors, publishers, creators, and others involved in the comics business. There’s Chris Staros, head of Top Shelf Comics, which publishes indie comic sweethearts Craig Thompson and Jeffrey Brown, and Heidi MacDonald, comics journalist, blogger and gossip queen. A little over 100 people show up over the course of the evening, even though it’s 7 degrees outside and the L train isn’t working, leaving Jigsaw a 15 minute walk from the closest subway station. People’s thick-rimmed glasses steam up when they come inside from the cold.
“Wait, what is this?” one 20-something in a long trench coat asks his friend.
“It’s just kind of … what it is,” the friend offers.
The store is buzzing with compliments for “Crazy Papers,” Jim Dougan and Danielle Corsetto’s debut graphic novel, but people seem to be more interested in Jigsaw and the news that tomorrow is its closing day. Even some of Jones’ good friends are hearing this for the first time. The long trench coat laments that he didn’t discover the shop sooner.
A little after midnight, Jones turns off all the lights. Someone asks him why. “I like disappearing into the shadows like a ninja,” he says. The last people leave around 1. John Jones gets three hours of sleep.
The next evening is a little rougher than expected. The New York Times runs an article on the Comic-Con and mentions John Jones and Jigsaw – and the public party with open bar, beginning at 7 p.m. Even with the L train out of commission and a wind-chill of 9 degrees, there’s a palpable dread about how many people will show up.
In the end, it’s only a few dozen more than the previous evening, but this crowd feels rash and desperate. Brendan Deneen and Szyman Kudranski, creators of the new comic “Scatterbrain,” decide to give their books away for free: it’s too much trouble to sell, and who wants to cart all the extras home? Most of the crowd is employed in the entertainment industry, and every few minutes someone mentions this as “the Weinstein Company party.” People are making last ditch efforts to network and seal deals over cigars in front of the store. No one really talks about the end of Jigsaw – they accept the inevitability, the pointlessness of complaining. Everyone seems more interested in the liquor than the comics. By 2 a.m., patrons who started the evening drinking Stella have moved on to tall cans of Pabst bought at the deli next door. In the end, Jones has to kick everyone out around 4. He stays in bed for the next two days, dreaming of a real kitchen, a living room, “and a bedroom with a door.”

bizarre

the family subotnick, inertia, meaninglessness

January, 2006. profile.


On the wall to the left of Jacob Subotnick’s bedroom door are three-foot letters spelling out “BEER” in green spray paint. Red plastic cups and Stella Artois bottles are strewn about the living room on the coffee table and folding TV trays in front of a television blaring an old episode of Law and Order. There are bits of toilet paper on the floor. Jacob shares the Bushwick loft with three other NYU students, one of whom asks if Jacob would like him to turn off the TV. Jacob says it doesn’t matter.
He moved out to Bushwick because it’s cheaper, and because he put off finding an apartment until the last minute, when no more East Village leases were to be had. “I certainly like it more out here. To me it somehow fees like the country, even though I live amidst a bunch of warehouses and factories,” he says over the melodic clink-clunk-clunk-clink of the metal factory across the street. He takes a green disposable lighter and a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and places them on the table next to a Stella bottle containing a couple inches of cigarette butts and ash. Jacob is scruffy and barefoot, wearing a black T-shirt and dark jeans, looking rumpled and tired as if he just rolled out of bed at two in the afternoon, which doesn’t seem entirely unlikely. His speech is measured and he yawns frequently, sometimes taking off his glasses off to rub his eyes.
Jacob is a senior at NYU where he studies music production. “He has a definite talent in the medium,” says his friend Jesse Malmed. “I wonder sometimes if he will live up to his potential.” But Jacob sees music less as his calling and more as a last resort. “It was the only logical way to go,” he says between drags from his cigarette. “The way that I got started was we just had all this extra equipment in our house so I could record all these bands in high school.”
Jacob was born in Santa Monica on September 2, 1984 to Joan La Barbara, a renowned singer, and Morton Subotnick, one of the premier composers of electronic music in the U.S. and a celebrated professor. When Jacob was six months old, the family moved to Pecos, a small town in New Mexico. As an only child, he accompanied his parents on their near-constant travels. “I would always go with them to all these bizarre places.” He pauses. “Well, not that bizarre, like Western Europe. But their music was certainly bizarre.” Morton Subotnick’s compositions are more soundscapes than traditional songs, and Joan La Barbara has worked with everyone from John Cage to Steve Reich.
They’re both bold-faced names in the New York City music world that Jacob is trying to maneuver through relatively unnoticed, which is nearly impossible when your dad teaches at your college, in your department. “The first like couple semesters, every music class I was in, they’d do the roll and be like, Oh, are you Mort’s kid?” He sighs. “But it doesn’t, like, bother me necessarily.” During the final for his ear training class, Jacob was singing off-key when the professor stopped him. “He was like, well, I trust that you actually can do this based on your parents. And I think I probably passed specifically because the guy had faith that I was actually capable of doing it even though I didn’t try.” I ask if he thinks he could’ve passed on his own merits if he had tried. He shrugs and lights another cigarette.
In recent years, the electronica movement in contemporary music has introduced Morton Subotnick to younger fans. He’s influenced popular bands from Radiohead to Animal Collective to Caribou, whose most recent album includes a track entitled “Subotnick.” “When I first moved out here one of the people who worked at the store across the street looked at my credit card and was like, Subotnick? Are you related to the one?” He laughs and shakes his head. “The majority of people who live in this area are like into that avant garde kind of stuff,” he says. There have been a few “bizarre” low-fi electronica concerts in Bushwick that Jacob’s friends and neighbors went to, but he doesn’t like the music.
Jacob’s friend Ari Phillips realized just what kind of music Jacob prefers when they were driving from New York to New Mexico two summers ago along the southern route. “I had brought my entire CD collection for the road trip and all Jacob wanted to listen to was pop-country radio stations,” Ari says. “I memorized ‘Live Like You Were Dying’ by Tim McGraw.”
When I ask Jacob if he likes his father’s music, he says, “No,” then quickly backpedals, laughing. “I mean, I don’t dislike it, but I’m certainly not actively interested in it.” Nor is he interested in composing music at all, preferring to collaborate with others as a musician or producer. Like most of his friends in New Mexico, Jacob learned guitar and played in indie rock bands on and off throughout high school and college. His high school band was called “Jacob’s Room,” inspired by their choice of practice space – and the poster in the room for the avant garde opera of the same name that Jacob’s parents premiered in 1985.
So what does his father think about his son doing music? “He’s never really said much about it,” Jacob says, flipping the lighter between his fingers. “He does keep saying it would be neat if there was a lawyer in the family.”
In September, Jacob had his first experience being paid to record and produce in a professional studio when a musician friend flew him out to San Francisco. “The final day we decided to try to do like a rough mix of everything. We went from noon ‘til eight in the morning the next day. From what I hear from my parents you just have days that are like 24 hours straight. Which is somehow appealing to me,” he says. “I just enjoy recording. But as far as like a job it’s pretty sweet. Like, everything is so laid back.” At that, he drops the lighter under the table and groans, and, with what seems an infinite amount of energy, leans down, grabs it and places it on the far corner of the table.
Aside from recording marathons, Jacob’s life is relatively laid back and sweet itself. When I ask what a typical day is like for him, his eyes glaze over and he taps his cheek with his finger. “I don’t know if there is a typical day…” he trails off. “I just sort of do whatever seems to happen.”

stanford what?

old stuff, broken stuff, awesome stuff

December, 2005.

Art and Susan Zuckerman feel their way around the dark corners of the Gould Memorial Library. As the building’s historical directors, the Zuckermans know most of what there is to know about the library, but there’s always room for surprises. “It’s kind of like a treasure hunt coming up here,” Art says, walking past the once-grand stacks now filled with discarded newspapers and Gatorade bottles instead of books. He points out where the Tiffany glass windows have been broken, where the pigeons roosted, and where a glass tile is missing in the floor, leaving a square foot gap. “Watch out for that,” he says, indicating the hole. “That’s,” he pauses, “pretty unusual.” But not entirely.
From its cracked tiles to exposed wires, flaking paint to graffiti, the Gould Memorial Library has come a long way since the 1890s, when it was designed by renowned architect Stanford White to resemble the Pantheon in Rome. The Gould was the main library at New York University’s Bronx campus until the campus was sold to the city university in 1973. The library was made a historical landmark in 1981, but has been mostly out of use for several years.
But that could soon change. In 2004, Bronx Community College won a $228,000 Campus Heritage Grant from the Getty Foundation to develop a plan to rehabilitate the Gould and its surrounding complex of buildings, including the Hall of Fame, a collonade filled with bronze busts of “great Americans,” the first of its kind in the country.
But as the planning stage comes to a close, the college is faced with the blessing and burden of the grant and the library: where will it get the money necessary to rehabilitate the building? And if they rebuild it, will anyone come? Or care?
“We asked 80 local history teachers if they knew about it. One knew,” said Art Zuckerman, shaking his head. “If this place was in Manhattan, it would be a mob scene. I don’t think there’s anything else like it in New York.”
“I think it’s Stanford White’s best work,” said Mark Anderson, an architect and the director of historic preservation at Facade Maintenance Design, which fixed some problems at the Gould in the mid 1990s. “Just making it a landmark doesn’t save it. It needs to give back to the college and community too, so they will mutually benefit from its existence.”
But as for the issue of funding, Anderson was less than optimistic. “The price of the work goes up exponentially the longer maintenance items are deferred,” he said. “It’s such a great building. They’re constantly, constantly trying to get funding. But I really don’t know.”
Some officials at the college were reluctant to speculate about what the next step will be. “We’re still figuring that out, it’s inconclusive so far. But if you ask me, I think it will take a lot,” said one official who asked not to be named.
“It would take millions and millions,” said Susan. “Slowly and surely, we’ve gotten some funding. But it’ll take a long time. And, really, we’re not sure it’ll come from anywhere.”
“I can’t believe the potential in this place,” said Art Zuckerman. “I think it’s all a matter of budget.”
The first things to be fixed at the Gould would be the elevator, to make the building handicap-accessible, and to build another exit, as only 75 people can currently be in the building at one time according to safety codes.
“Those are the major things. If they could get that done, maybe they could have fundraising events. It could be self-sustaining,” Susan said.
For now the school is looking toward more unusual sources of income, starting with the film industry. Two months ago, Robert De Niro and Angelina Jolie shot parts of the upcoming film “The Good Shepard” at the library, and other films such as “Sophie’s Choice,” “Kinsey,” and “A Beautiful Mind” have also been shot at the Gould. The Zuckermans are now seeking out photographers who might use the library for photo shoots, and cable networks such as the History and Learning Channel to donate.
“We’re going to start up the Friends of the Library again, and ask NYU alumni,” said Susan.
“They cannot let this place go,” Art added. “Everyone can see the potential value of this building. Every person who comes in reacts the same way: ‘Oh my god,’ they say.”

bizarro

dan piraro, clinton hill, chocolate

November, 2005. profile.

Last week was San Francisco, next is Los Angeles, but today, Sunday, syndicated cartoonist Dan Piraro is at home in Brooklyn, and that means football: the Dallas Cowboys versus the New York Giants.
"I'm watching this in hopes that the Dallas Cowboys lose," he says with a wry smile. "I always root against any Texas team for any reason."
Dan's deadline is Monday, so he spends Sunday watching the game while drawing all of the week's Bizarro cartoons, sitting on the couch with his stocking feet on the wood coffee table, gaze alternating between the television and the cardboard and cartoon balanced on a pillow in his lap. He has short, dark hair, with sideburns that flare out below his earlobes and tiny silver hoop earrings. Black Clark Kent glasses balance on a large nose. A tiny burst of facial hair about an inch long sprouts out from under his bottom lip, and he twirls it and narrows his eyes when he's anxious or concentrating or both.
"I get done a lot faster if I just listen to music and don't watch TV. But…" he looks back at the television. When he misses a good play, there's a minor battle with the remote control before he finagles the TiVo into replaying the segment. The TiVo console stands on its side next to the television and the hundreds of compact discs set in tall, precarious towers. The living room is bright and overwhelming, with lime green walls and chairs carved from hunks of wood, throw pillows shaped like pigeons and gorillas, and nearly every useable surface occupied by a mess of papers, a little sculpture or a stack of hardcover comic books.
"How cool would it be to send all those rednecks home angry." It's not a question. Dan's bitterness toward Texas is born from a combination of liberal politics and personal experience: he lived in Dallas for 22 years, pining for a move but feeling obligated to stay and support his family, until he discovered that his wife was cheating on him. After they divorced, he moved to New York, a city he'd often fantasized about since childhood.
When he's drawing, Dan keeps the sound down on the TV to avoid the commentators. He mimics their accents and mocks the players' names, often laughing at these imitations, a high-pitched giggle that makes him seem much younger than 47. He pencils each panel on letter-sized paper, then inks over the lines, finishing the bulk of the week's work in a few hours, mostly while watching football. Drawing has always been Dan's favorite thing to do, but he credits his sense of humor for getting him out of commercial illustration and into cartooning. "I was always class clown. Occasionally I would get in trouble for it, but I usually knew when to stop, where to draw the line."
Nearly twenty years after it first appeared in print, Bizarro is syndicated by King Features and is printed in over 250 newspapers, and Dan has published ten different collections of the cartoon. Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, he is acutely aware of how he measures up to other cartoonists, many of whom outsource some work to save time. Dan, however, likes to maintain complete creative control. "Reason #423 of why I am not rich and probably never will be. Reason #422 is I'm a lousy businessman and I hate marketing. #421, I can't keep my mouth shut about the things I believe." Dan, an animal-rights activist and vegan, started criticizing animal cruelty in Bizarro only a few years ago, but most of his more partisan political commentaries didn't appear until before the election last fall. Those cartoons are often the targets of fiery hate mail, some of which he uses in his stand-up comedy routines. He reads them aloud in an impassioned performance for me and the television. The first letter rambles about Dan's liberal leanings and atheist tendencies before a warning: when Jesus returns for the last judgment, "you will be sorry." Dan's response: "When Santa Claus returns and feeds conservatives to his magic reindeer, you'll be sorry." Another letter tells him that Bizarro is not his political pulpit.
"There's always the people who say I am not Doonesbury,'" he says, and launches into a sneering imitation of his critics. "'Does the first amendment give you the right to desecrate other people's beliefs? Yes, yes it does. That's exactly what it means!" He sighs. "This country's so screwed up."
Dan muses about finishing his Bizarro run and devoting more time to “other projects,” presumably more cross-country jaunts and oil painting. "I've always planned to retire and produce paintings and drawings and have gallery representation and sell some work," he says. "I think I'll be remembered as one of the better gag cartoonists of the late 20th century." He giggles, then spins around and opens a drawer on a brushed metal cabinet, takes out a dark chocolate candy bar and breaks off a small chunk. "I eat tiny amounts all day. It's good for you." He pops the piece in his mouth. I mention the mood-enhancing qualities of chocolate and he laughs. "I need all the mood-enhancing I can get."

and now it's sooner still

fake collaboration, waiting for godot, obscure references

June, 2005.

A Hypothetical Play in One Act

It is a fairly average day and two young women are slowly traveling in circles. Susie wears a worn pair of roller skates and Jenn chews on an unlit tobacco pipe and holds a metal detector. They are looking at the ground and appear to be searching for something.

SUSIE: When I was a kid, I used to look for coins on the street because I didn’t have friends.
JENN: Coins are better than friends - they can be exchanged for goods and services, and they don’t usually talk.
SUSIE: That’s true. If I had had friends, I might have had to share my findings with them.
JENN: Well, I’ll admit that communism works in theory –
SUSIE: In theory.
JENN: – but it requires an inexhaustible love for mankind.
SUSIE: It’s not very conducive to our misanthropy.
JENN: Mankind in general has proven itself unworthy time and time again of my compassion. I don’t want to help these people! Throws pipe to the ground. Why should I want to buy the world a goddamn Coke? Begins violently smashing the metal detector into the concrete, destroying it. That world is a fascist snake pit of deception and –
SUSIE: Okay, I get the point.
JENN: Sorry, I just get so… you know.
SUSIE: I know. Just, Jesus, stop breaking things. The girls shift their focus back on their search for coins. A minute or so of awkward silence passes.
JENN: It’s sunny, at least.
SUSIE: A fine day for roller skating. And metal detecting, but I guess you ruined that for yourself.
JENN: No matter. All is well in the world. A quiet beeping is heard from Jenn’s digital watch. Oh, finally! She takes a pill container from her pocket and tosses contents of Monday into her mouth. She takes a heart shaped metal flask from the other pocket and washes them down.
SUSIE: Um, forgive me for asking, but – She stops suddenly as they notice a morose and filthy looking man approaching with a shopping cart full of eccentric items and heaps of trash. A rain cloud follows the man, and he and his cart are very wet.
MAN: (in a hoarse whisper). I’m leaving. Man then begins to laugh loudly, startling the girls, who react by throwing their collected coins at him. The man is in turn startled and quickly gathers the coins and runs away, laughing abjectly.
JENN: See? Capitalism at work. Jenn climbs into the cart, which is still being rained on. She covers her head with an old newspaper and begins to play sad accordion music as Susie rolls the cart along in the rain. Jenn begins to rummage through the other objects. He has a lot of trash in here. Digging around. Ew, Beckett! Tosses the book out of the cart.
SUSIE: (retrieving it). Don’t do that! We might need some tips later.
JENN: Oh, you’re right. Sorry. Hey look, he has the plague! Holds up a dog-eared copy of Camus.
SUSIE: Oh my god you’re clever.
JENN: What?
SUSIE: Nothing.
JENN: Oh Jesus. Looks frightened, holds up a large book and reads the title. The Secret Plot To Kill The Homeless.
SUSIE: Oh Jesus.
JENN: It wouldn’t be so secret if he didn’t keep it buried under all this crap. You know, I think it’s really tragic how such important things end up with morose, dirty people who don’t share them.
SUSIE: Maybe he’s just protecting his most prized possessions. It’s the American way. Is there a gun in there?
JENN: Probably. Digs through the cart, tossing objects over the sides – clocks and maps of different makes and sizes.
SUSIE: He has a lot of… time.
JENN: And… place.
SUSIE: I wonder what he’s up to.
JENN: You never listen. Hey look, dice! We’re finding so much today. Rolls them over and over in her hand. Watch alarm beeps again, and Jenn takes more pills from Tuesday this time with the flask contents. I think I need to get out of here. I feel trapped. Climbs out, begins pushing the cart instead.
SUSIE: That’s ironic.
JENN: What?
SUSIE: Nothing. Yanks the old newspaper Jenn’s been using as an umbrella over to her own head.
JENN: Wait. She snatches it back, reads quickly. The classifieds! Free stuff!
SUSIE: Ooh, anything good? Broken typewriters? Mexican blankets? I’d prefer blue.
JENN: Let’s see… soiled mattresses… a used left arm cast… Heavy sigh. I don’t want this stuff, do you? Before waiting for a response, she tosses the wet newspaper back into the cart but continues pushing it. Susie shrugs. The watch alarm beeps again. Yess, this stuff.
SUSIE: (hesitant). Um, what stuff?
JENN: (removing flask and pills from pockets). This stuff! Want some? Sharing is caring.
SUSIE: I thought you were into capitalism.
JENN: Only when I’m depressed. Hands Susie the flask.
SUSIE: (takes a swig and looks confounded, then condescending {alternatively: perplexed, then patronizing}). This… isn’t alcohol.
JENN: (dazed). What?
SUSIE: This isn’t alcohol. It’s apple juice.
JENN: (taking the flask from her with little to no care). Well, you know what they say – one man’s apple juice is another –
SUSIE: No one says that.
JENN: I do! Takes a long pull from the flask. You know, I don’t like it when you judge me. Takes some pills from Wednesday, washes them down and staggers a bit to the side. Susie grabs her elbow.
SUSIE: Are you okay? What are those?
JENN: (slurring). Wednesdays! Try one. Hands a pill and the flask to Susie. Susie is clearly skeptical but takes the pill anyway. Jenn looks at her expectantly.
SUSIE: That’s a sugar pill. Where did you get those?
JENN: (quietly). Um, I’m not really supposed to say.
SUSIE: What? Are you paying for placebos?
JENN: Loose lips sink ships! Drinks from the flask, then gazes at it contemplatively. You know, my grandfather used to collect flasks.
SUSIE: What kinds?
JENN: All of them. He was an alcoholic. Drinks more. He got this for my grandmother for their 25th anniversary. He had a gold one specially made for their 50th. She was dead by then, though. Drinks again. She only drank juice.
SUSIE: (somewhat cautiously). That doesn’t seem terribly perceptive of him.
JENN: Well, what do you expect? He was drunk. All old people collect strange knick-knacks, and most of them are significantly less useful than flasks.
SUSIE: My grandfather collected bookshelves. Those are useful. He had a bookshelf room in their old house.
JENN: You mean a library?
SUSIE: No, a bookshelf room. He was bibliophobic.
JENN: Oh… how tragic. His whole life?
SUSIE: No, just in old age. But he never liked to read. I think I’ve heard that as you get older, you become more and more yourself.
JENN: Mark Doty says that drugs make you more yourself. Maybe being old will be like being on drugs. Then I won’t have to buy these anymore. Fondles plastic container lovingly, then puts it and the flask away.
SUSIE: You buy those to be more yourself?
JENN: Isn’t that why we do everything?
SUSIE: No, I don’t think so.
JENN: What are you saying? Wait, how am I not myself?
SUSIE: Those aren’t drugs. You’ll probably get real drugs when you’re old.
JENN: I’ll need them more then.
SUSIE: Really? I’ve always imagined that it gets easier with time. Desensitization through the mundane and repetitive act of living each day.
JENN: Maybe that’s why old people are capitalists – they’re all depressed.
SUSIE: Maybe we shouldn’t be ourselves.
JENN: (frightened). Then what should we be?
SUSIE: I don’t know. I can’t think in this rain.
JENN: I want answers, goddamnit. Rolls dice over and over in her hand, almost compulsively.
SUSIE: That’s ironic.
JENN: What?
SUSIE: Nothing. Well- shined dress shoes enter, walk over to the girls, who gaze up at them. The morose and ragged looking man leans down and they see that he has cleaned up and is wearing a gray suit. He smiles at them.
JENN: Why are you so tall?
MAN: (laughing). Why are you going in circles?
JENN: (confused). What?
SUSIE: (looking around, realizing their predicament). Oh shit, this is terrible. We’ve walked ourselves into a goddamn hole.
The man stands up and walks off stage, still laughing.
JENN: What should we do?
SUSIE: I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do…
JENN: But what should we do?
SUSIE: Crap, crap, I don’t know, I just said that, I don’t know what to do.
JENN: I’m sorry. What should we do?
SUSIE: I don’t know! You’re freaking me out.
JENN: But we have to do something.
SUSIE: Quiet, shhh. Quiet. Just let me think.
JENN: But you can’t think in this rain.
SUSIE: Oh my god, I can’t think in this rain.
JENN: (desperate). I think we should go further.
SUSIE: What?
JENN: We’ve already gone quite far.
SUSIE: A line allows progress, a circle does not.
JENN: (elitist). When did you get so emo?
SUSIE: (emo). Just now, I think. I think I need to get out of here. I feel trapped.
JENN: But we can’t! We have to get to the bottom of this. Digging in the mud. Drop the emo thing and start thinking logically. Who knows what we might find down here!
SUSIE: Nothing.
JENN: What? Hits a water main and their rut begins flooding. Susie takes off her roller skates and the girls tread water.
SUSIE: Well, that works, more or less.
JENN: We were wet anyway. Her tobacco pipe floats by and Jenn wipes it off and puts it back in her mouth. The girls swim toward the shopping cart, which is inexplicably floating, and climb in. While Susie searches the cart and surrounding water for a map, Jenn fashions hats from pages of Camus. She puts one on her head and one on Susie, who at precisely this moment finds the correct map under her foot. Jenn tosses Beckett overboard, then realizes something. Wait – shopping carts don’t float.
SUSIE: Shh! He’ll hear you.
JENN: Okay, okay, sorry. God. Rolling dice in her hand.
SUSIE: Hey, did you ever find that gun? The girls and shopping cart float offstage in a befitting awkward silence.

Curtain.

marriage and death; death and marriage

flash non-fiction, weddings and funerals, thank you barry spacks

May, 2004.

This Ship Will Never Sail (published in literary journal Spectrum, '05 ed.)

Marriage? They must be joking. My parents at the dining room table are drinking white wine and expecting impossible things from me, like dates and relationships and -- marriage? And I cannot help but have this thought of Jacob Theil on a Friday in eighth grade after he missed my cheek and kissed my jaw and making eye contact for the first time since we started holding hands on Monday. "You're hot, Susie, but you're just too depressing to be with." And I let go of his sweaty hand then, or maybe I squeezed it harder, I honestly can't remember. So I down my glass of Chardonnay, pour another, and wonder if or when some proverbial wind will fill my proverbial sails, but either way, I think it's safe to say that I'd find rocky shore faster than you can say -- marriage?


In memorium

Sean asked me if I had ever seen a dead body, and I hadn't. Freeways, he said, are great places to see dead bodies. His eyes narrowed for the description of the man's first half lodged in the windshield, the other on the ground making Red Asphalt, like the short movie we watched in driving school the next year. He said it was fascinating. And I wonder if he would have liked to see his own dead self lying on damp pavement on that Thursday night: the memories of cold flesh stuck in glass seeping out cracks in his skull and mixing with blood, drying fast and hot and matting his hair. I wonder if he did see his mouth open up a few minutes after his heart stopped pumping, gaping darkly like something he'd seen before.

love and death; death and love

flash fiction, fifteen minute writing exercises, a long time ago

April, 2004.

The Office

No one at the office agreed with Sheila Smith-Brownman’s choice except for Dawn, the new intern whose pink claw-like fingernails seemed to expedite her filing responsibilities to an inhuman degree. The raise was too big, too sudden, and too – Brad? He was the problem. Dave had been there for nine years, longer than Sheila herself; Janie brought brownies every Friday and never called in sick; Chase was undoubtedly the best worker, and he bid Sheila a friendly “Hello” every morning. Why Brad? besides the obvious reasons – the straw blond hair (“dyed”), grass green eyes (“contacts”), and wide white smile (“veneers”). Not to mention how much help he’d been to Sheila during her nasty divorce from Mr. Brownman, staying late at the office for weeks on end that winter, soaked through with Sheila’s crocodile tears and endless supply of gin. And Brad was rewarded for his troubles. Dave was too awkward, Janie, too shrill. And Chase had a gambling problem which Sheila had no intention of exacerbating, despite his cute “Hello”s and his light touches on her hand when he turned in his meticulous quarterly reports, a dark curl falling over his eye and – had she chosen wrong? No, no. Sheila always made wise decisions.

Sheila and Brad are on the airplane with rolling suitcases that fit perfectly in the overhead bins, except Sheila has packed too much (“I’ve never been to Hawaii before”) and the flight attendants are more than mildly irritated. Bag stowed in the compartment, they seat themselves in first class and Sheila orders a dry martini, and another. She’s passed out by the time the plane goes down (dead to the world twice), but Brad is wide awake, making seven-dollar-a-minute phone calls to girls in Detroit and Kansas City and smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, combing his hair, masturbating into the electric-blue solution in the toilet. And then he is panicking, struggling with the yellow oxygen mask with the broken elastic, and the life vest under his seat, and then with Sheila’s bag as it presses him down into the tray table, under the water.

Oh God, Come Quickly

The wind blows low across the roof of the house; I hear it whistling through the windows in the living room, and it smells like the Atlantic, like the dead roots of trees, like motor oil. The back door slams shut. Maybe the glass breaks. Maybe I’ve cut myself.
Out the clean kitchen window, the city is gray with rain and dust. Cars crowd it, luggage battened down with plywood and duct tape, their ironic armor determinedly pushing through clouded streets. Small children in the backseats. Messy hair, huge eyes, tiny fingers.
I take out my pocket watch - 3:29. Another half an hour, if that. Why didn’t these people leave earlier?
Small muscles twitch in my arm, and I consider calling Allison. But the urge quickly passes, dissolves out of my failing bones and maybe drops onto the wet floor somewhere, mixing with the mud from my boots. I reason the phones are probably out by now anyway; plastic receivers dead all over the Carolinas. And if I am wrong, which I'm sure is not the case, the lines are at least thick with frantic, weeping people, so many that they can't all possibly get through.
Who would I be to take their place? What do I have to say about any of this? And why are they all trying to get out now – don’t they understand it’s too late?
A tree loosens and tips somewhere, or a car flies up off the breaking asphalt, while the others get sucked down into the rising brown water. The lights flicker all at once. I catch a last glance out the clear paneled window before I fall.
The tile is cold on my back, wet and dirty, glass, ceramic, my back, my legs, my head hurts. My temple, my left temple, it hurts, it's bleeding. And there was a crack, now two, and the wind, screaming through the open back door and through the house, the white and gray of the dust and the rain, the dark scratching of the leaves crawling inside and the ceiling, the ceiling, cracking, falling, the ceiling, and I

wars

flash pseudo-fiction, iraq, children

April, 2004.

(The Human Condition)

1.
Jared hopes that Christine and I weren’t talking about him last week. He hopes that we didn’t have anything (too) bad to say about why he left school, why he joined the army, why he’s calling me from Baghdad now at four on Tuesday morning.
“Don’t be so suspicious,” I tell him.
“All my suspicions eventually dry out,” he explains, “and form the crust inside me.”
“Something to fill the void?” A pause.
“There’s nothing wrong with a void, s’long as you don’t cave in.”

2.
Jared is surprised: he assumed I knew that he and Beth had married.
“I just heard yesterday. Congratulations.” This comes out dry.
“Oh, yes, well…” he trails off and I close my eyes and we’re quiet.

3.
I try to avoid the obvious, picking up these short silences with random questions for a few more minutes, until he asks about the pictures. There’re three of them he sent in a dirty envelope several weeks ago, with a note that said only “I’ll call you.” He captions them for me. These aren’t pictures like the ones on television; they’re just Jared looking dusty and taller (wearing glasses?) and they don’t seem real.

4.
Jared reminds me that I owe him $50 for a middle school bet I can’t remember over which of our teachers would die first.
“If you don’t recall, I’ll just forgive your debt.”
“I’ll take you and Beth out to dinner when you get back,” I offer. “Then I think we should be even.”
“That sounds fair,” and without a breath, “better than going to my funeral, right?”

5.
He sounds to me thirteen again, on the roof of my parents’ house with the malt liquor and cigarettes, talking about impulses. He crawls close to the edge and tiny rocks slide down the slate.
“Like what if I just pushed myself off, just fell?”
“You shouldn’t,” I can only suggest things to Jared.
“But you only have to push. And the rest just happens.”
Jared and I peer over the edge for a long time, smoking, daring each other silently.

another $20, thank you very much.

art imitates life, life imitates art, i imitate safe cliches

various, 2003/2004.

Blacklist

Davey and I stand at the edge of the McCarthy garden, and smoke cigarettes he hand-rolled in his studio that afternoon. His hair reflects gold in the fountain. This is actively waiting, he says, scuffing his foot along the edge of what the Hollywood Ten said fifty years ago, carved into significantly thick stone tiles. Everything in life should be done actively. But I'm not listening, because the lights have begun to trail on the gas station across the street,
and when I turn back, Davey's found a bullet in the gravel.



John Milton

My English professor rests his hands on his stomach between making points, an exultant gray-haired brown Buddha
at the head of the table, waxing critical about the loss of paradise.

"This is the most explicit warning." rest. "The archangel Raphael will give them." rest. "Foreshadowing their inevitable fall." rest.

He frowns, the vertical grooves in his forehead deepening canyons in his dark skin as though he hasn’t read this book before, as though he doesn’t know what will happen. He strokes his leather brown neck with his left hand, gold wedding band somehow brighter against such age.

anti-hero

second person, freshman year, bad (at) endings

May, 2003. $20-winning fiction. Adam liked the concept, but it felt a little contrived, he said. I think I agree. too bad it's pseudo-fiction. maybe my life is contrived.

Wake.

You are walking down the block. You do this often. You walk from your apartment past the dirty park and the playing children on your right and past the staggered office buildings on your left. You do not have a destination. You are not going anywhere. You are not going anywhere often. You are smoking a cigarette, your third of the day. You only smoke five a day. Except when you do not remember how many you have had, and you always have another then. You forget often. You used to remember everything, and then something happened. You have heard the expression that some people use - saying that something awoke in them - but something fell asleep in you. Something important. And it had not woken up in a very long time. This dulled your mind. It dulled your mind more than what you snorted, smoked, and swallowed and it did not bother you very much anymore.
You are not who you once recognized as yourself. You do the childhood trick of staring in the mirror and saying your name over and over again until you can no longer associate yourself with that arrangement of letters that happens to be what you are. Angela is foreign to you. Angela. It does not mean anything, it no longer describes you. You do not transcend. Rather you sink below what you used to be. You are something new now, but it is certainly not something worth being.
You are incapable of specificity. Everything feels familiar. You have a permanent sense of déjà vu, but you can never discern whether this means you have been to this place before. Or perhaps if it means that you are trying to create memories out of nothing.
Before this, you never woke up in places you did not recognize. You never forgot poems you had written, paintings you had finished, or half-finished, usually the latter. You never got telephone calls from strangers who inexplicably knew you and wanted to meet for coffee.
That is where you are going. This just comes to your mind: to meet the stranger for the coffee. You told her, the stranger. You told her that you could not remember her, and she seemed upset. She said you were friends. She said she knew you very well. Once upon a time, she said, she knew Jared.
You remember Jared. You remember your brother’s ubiquitous baseball hat and the way he staggered down the hallway when you were having your 12th birthday slumber party with your three best friends. You remember the way that Jared filled a space in yourself, and you remember finding what he filled his spaces with in a brown paper bag in the backseat of his 1989 silver Volvo two weeks after your birthday party. Today you think that space in you is full of all the things that you cannot remember. You know that is what fills it.
You realize that you’ve passed the coffee shop by half a block. You are not used to having a destination. And you go back, to meet the girl, and have the coffee. In the coffee shop. You walk in. It is orange and brown. You have never been inside this particular coffee shop, but it seems recognizable in some way. Many things do when you cannot particularly remember anything. And you see a pallid girl with yellow hair that grazes her cheeks and threatens to dip into her speckled grey mug full two thirds with something very black. Until she lifts her head to look at you and her eyes seem less tired . You know your face doesn‘t show it, but you remember her. You sit down across from her, on the orange cushion on the brown plastic bench.
As soon as you sit down you entertain the idea of running away. You like running away. You are sure that there is some inherent reason for this, and you have a sense of some lost expounding memory; false or true, you can‘t decide. But you are frozen. This is what occurs when you think of running. You do not know why, but you enjoy leaving. You like watching things come to an end. It’s the beginnings that scare you. This scares you. And she is smiling.

And you are running.
Away from the carousel at Playland in Rye, your jelly sandals slapping against the old cement. You usually take care to avoid the black circles of long-ago discarded gum, and the joints where the slabs of concrete were laid side by side. Now you don’t notice when you almost trip over the root of a tree growing up through the path. When you reach the railing on the pier, you take hold of it with both of your small hands. Rust from the barrier colors your palms as you watch the waves break.
And then you feel hands on your shoulders and Jared’s newly adolescent voice. Why were you running? You wanted to make sure you still could. Why wouldn’t you? You aren’t sure. It just seemed important. So why did you stop?

And you are awake. Not in New York. Not watching waves, not with Jared, and not seven years old again.
You are alone. This has been the routine for almost two years now but sometimes you forget, and stretch your arm out into the darkness instinctively when you wake up in the middle of the night like an infant reaching for its mothers hand.
But you slept soundly and it is morning.
And you’re too preoccupied with your dream last night and this sense of déjà vu.
You can’t eat. Or you don’t think you can. There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach that you could confuse with nausea. You decide that food could fill it. Fill a soul that you don’t believe in, but you like to use the word anyway, and so you eat. Only to become more nauseated. This sinking feeling is new, it’s an indication of some change, and the dream won’t leave your mind. You light a cigarette and go to the window.

You are sitting in the front seat of Jared’s car, playing with rubber bands and plastic bags that he always has stuck between the gear shift and emergency brake. He is moving at the end of summer and said that he would show you what this place is really about before he left. And now you find yourself parked in front of one of the perfectly manicured lawns that leads up to an immaculate white two story house with a three car garage. You know what people do inside these houses? You think Jared must mean something besides eat breakfast and watch television, so you don’t know. Nothing worth doing. You don’t understand. Everyone here’s paralyzed. They aren’t living. You still don’t understand. No, I suppose you don’t. But you will.
As he talks, your brother reaches into the back seat and pulls out a bulging manila envelope. I’ll be back in a second. And he is out of the car and into the white house. You don’t tell Jared that you know what he keeps in those envelopes, because you know how much it would hurt him if you did.
When he gets back in the car, he doesn’t rev the engine right away like he always does. Instead he turns to you and puts his hand on your skinny shoulder and tells you something that you’ll soon forget. Don’t ever live your life like that, Angela.

You’re sitting at your desk, scribbling down what could be as momentous as your lost memories, or as trivial as waking dreams, or perhaps a combination of both. And the telephone rings. You jump at the sound and don’t know what to do, because the telephone hasn’t rung in weeks and that time it was a wrong number. You let it go one, two, three, four times before you answer, or rather pick up the receiver and say nothing. Angela? You are still frozen. Angela, it’s Elizabeth. You’re sorry, but you don’t know an Elizabeth. You are about to hang up. Fuck Angela, stop. I had to track down your whole goddamn family to get this number.
Her language surprises you. You haven’t felt strongly enough about anything in years to say fuck, and you wonder if that means this girl really does care about you. You laugh at the irony of this. Why are you laughing? You’re sorry again, it’s nothing. I want to see you, let’s meet for coffee or something cliché like that. You don’t know, it is very cliché. Angela, please. She gives you an address, a time. Please. You hear yourself say yes, and then you click the receiver back into the cradle, not fully understanding what you have just done.

Elizabeth is sitting in the doorway of your room like you are supposed to do during an earthquake, and she is biting her nails. Her blonde hair falls past her shoulders as she stares at her fingers and apologizes for coming over on such short notice, but her parents were fighting again and she really didn’t know where else to go. You tell her it’s okay. She breathes deeply and you can tell it’s hard for her, because when she’s upset, her asthma gets worse. She apologizes again.
Jared walks down the hall and Elizabeth stops talking, following your brother with her bright eyes. When he goes in his room and locks the door, she turns back to you. There’s something different about him. You nod. But I don’t know what it is. You think about this, and nod again.

You’ve been staring at this wall for seventeen minutes when you realize that it’s all been real. For so long, all you wanted to do was remember. But after a while, the loss had become comfortable. A warm blanket of amnesia. And now you’re lost in yourself again.
You try to think of why you’d remember now. Why not last week, you wonder, or next. The last two years of your life have been routine, no considerable changes besides new neighbors and a Republican-controlled senate, neither of which interested you much either way.
You roll a cigarette up and down the desk, and finally light it with restaurant matches you find in your pocket. You run your hand along the edge of the telephone. There’s a crack in the plastic base and knots in the spiral cord. You look at your finger, gray from the dust you’ve removed, and wonder how you ever got here. And why you can’t leave.

It’s Sunday morning and Jared isn’t asleep in his room. You linger at his door, half-expecting the blankets on his bed to stir, but you’ve already checked them twice.
You open the metal gate to your backyard, the one that guarded your younger self from the dangers of the swimming pool. You let it slam back into the lock as you wander up the little grass hills and toward the concrete lined hole of water. For what reason, you can’t say. Until you see your brother’s hat floating not far from himself, and you freeze. As motionless as him. There’s a brown paper bag by the diving board and his clothes, and you’re running out of the yard and the gate, past your house and down the block.

There’s a pencil in your hand and you’ve been absent-mindedly writing go go go on the compressed chipboard desk. You consider erasing it but instead put the pencil down.
You look at the coat that you dropped last night by the door, a black mess of fabric, and the keys that you know are buried under it. The dirty shoes next to it. You finger the couple of dollars in your front pocket and bite your lip. These are your tickets out of here. These are your means of running away, you already have the reasons, and for the first time, you have a purpose.
You pick up the coat, the shoes, the keys. You write the address on the back of your right hand. You don’t even bother to lock the front door, and you drop your cigarette in the hall on your way out.

You’re sitting on the bed and explaining to Elizabeth about Jared and the swimming pool and the overdose on something K that you can’t remember because your mind is swimming like he couldn’t. She scuffs the floor with her shoe and stares at the digital alarm clock. It is two years later but she had disappeared to California with her mother and new father without even giving you a phone number. So you can pretend like you would have called to tell her when you know you wouldn’t have.
She looks at you for a long time. I’m sorry. You know. You can’t look at her, and if you could, you wouldn’t be able to see her.

You are walking down the block. You do this often. You walk from your apartment past the dirty park and the playing children on your right and past the staggered office buildings on your left. You are smoking a cigarette, your third of the day. You only smoke five a day. Except when you do not remember how many you have had, and you always have another then.
You are incapable of specificity. Everything feels familiar. You have a permanent sense of déjà vu, but you can never discern whether this means you have been to this place before. Or perhaps if it means that you are trying to create memories out of nothing.
Before this, you never got telephone calls from strangers who inexplicably knew you and wanted to meet for coffee.
That is where you are going. This just comes to your mind: to meet the stranger for the coffee. You told her that you could not remember her, and she seemed upset. She said you were friends. She said she knew Jared.
You remember Jared. You remember your brother driving you through the nice parts of Rye, New York, and explaining how people live like they are dead. You remember finding your brother in a coma in your backyard swimming pool, and the brown paper bag that you knew put him there. And running down the block until you couldn‘t feel your legs.
You realize that you’ve passed the coffee shop by half a block. You are not used to having a destination. And you go back, to meet the girl, and have the coffee. You walk in. You have never been inside this particular coffee shop, but it seems recognizable in some way. And you see a pallid girl with yellow hair that grazes her cheeks and threatens to dip into her speckled grey mug full two thirds with something very black. Until she lifts her head to look at you and her bright eyes seem less tired . You remember her.
Elizabeth.
You sit down across from her, on the orange cushion on the brown plastic bench.
As soon as you sit down you entertain the idea of running away. But you are frozen. This is what occurs when you think of running. You do not know why, but you enjoy leaving. You like watching things come to an end. It’s the beginnings that scare you. This scares you.
And she is smiling.
And you are awake.

the synesthetic childhood experience, out of color

non-fiction, rumors flew for weeks, nabokov had synesthesia too

May, 2003. $20 in my pocket.

All of Our Crossing Paths
a memoir

I.

Meredith is paler than pale. We are four during swimming lessons in the dirty Farm School pool, and her mouth is icy blue and her teeth are chattering. Even at their best, her tiny pucker-lips are barely the color of normal toddler skin, without the Crayola pink tint of my own. Iron deficiency, my mother muses. She plays at my house one day; dinner is chicken and broccoli, because my mother cooked then. Merry peels the broccoli stalks away from each other, arranging a tiny budding forest around her drumstick.
My parents ask her if she eats green things. She is thinking, thinking. Minutes pass, I’m sure. Finally she finds an answer: i eat green m&m’s.
Meredith lives in Buster Keaton’s old three-story house built into the side of a cliff with a Valium-addicted mother and slant-eyed, distant father; two brothers come later. We play in the forbidden black-leather library whenever her father leaves to take their cruel black mutt, Indiana, on walks in the jagged mountains. We watch movies projected from enormous metallic discs onto an enormous blank screen at one end of the room. The Princess Bride is our favorite. If her father catches us, he curses with words I won’t learn for years while Merry and I scramble to replace mislaid couch cushions and picture books. Sometimes her mother walks in on such invectives and scoots us into the well-lit kitchen with checkerboard tile that my parents will copy in our own house eight years later. She makes us grilled cheese and pours cloudy organic apple juice into plastic tumblers without sippy lids, and tells us not to spill on the white carpet in the hall because she just doesn‘t have the energy to clean up after us today, as she leads us down to the living room on the second floor.
Even more compelling than the library is the glowing metallic ball in the living room with the electro-static ribbons of purple and blue light that shoot out of it and grab tiny fingers, sending little shockwaves into our hands before we go dancing up and down the hall yelling in tiny pre-school voices. After one such game, I lie on the floor with my hands on my flat chest, feeling it rise and fall as I catch my breath.
in. out. rise. fall. stop. hold. gasp. in.
I yell for Meredith to come here and isn’t this great?
And it’s what? what are you doing?
We consciously breathe for the rest of the afternoon, lying on the carpet with our fingers on the not-yet hardened cartilage of our small sternums.
We sneak onto the living room’s tiny wood-slatted balcony that faces the shear drop off the rough mountain overhang. Merry screams and I laugh as we toss her old dog-mutilated Barbie dolls over the unstable balustrade; their plastic blond hair, almost the same shade as my own, catches in the breeze and waves frantically at us in the seconds before they hit the side of the cliff and shatter plastic body parts into the creek below. Years later, my father relates to me the story of him and a friend sitting on the roof of their Manhattan apartment, dropping Italian pastries onto the sidewalk below, and I understand and appreciate the tone his voice takes as he describes the creamy splatter patterns that decorated the street.
In our south-western corner of Los Angeles, early October is still swimming season, and Meredith and I are changing into black and white polka-dotted two-piece bathing suits with attached ruffles that mimic skirts and cannon-balling into her side-yard pool. Her parents are less strict (or as I will realize later, merely less conscientious) than my own, and don’t get angry when we jump from the concrete and tile edges of the pool into the deep end; I, however, prefer the rickety gray diving board. Its surface scratches the bottoms of my feet as I run across it and jump. When I emerge, my face is covered with rotting orange and brown leaves from Buster Keaton‘s old trees; her parents don’t fish them out after August.
On more than one occasion, Meredith chooses me as her solitary companion on the evenings her parents throw bizarre, smoky parties that fill their angular house with equally tall, angular people. Her father, a television writer and sometimes comic book artist, invites his intriguing industry friends to their home most Friday nights, where they drink Jack Daniels, smoke Cubans, and complain about the eighties.
Usually Merry and I are allowed to float through the cliques of anorexic women and gray-haired men until we tire of them, which never seems to happen. Sometimes we dress like them, Meredith in a velvet cape and I in all black; when I am fifteen, I will see my friend again and for the last time, dressed in what I swear is the same exact cape, with dark kohl lines drawn around her cool blue eyes. She will tell me about her new philosophy or religion or something that starts with a W, and I will patiently listen, then hug her goodbye, my long ballet arms reaching around her still thin white ones.


II.

Larisa’s brothers call her Sissy; if someone were to call me this, I’d probably kick them hard in the shins, even at five.
She is blunt, it’s short for sister, and I too with but sister isn’t that long. She rolls her eyes.
I am in Larisa’s living room the summer my brother is born; we are playing with her brothers Brian and Greg in the dim, narrow confines of the collapsing fort we’d constructed and slept in the night before. It’s one thirty six in the afternoon and I don’t want to leave to go to the hospital, even when my mother tells me I can hold him.
We meet in morning kindergarten, probably on the gated plastic playground, rubber puzzle mats that make your hands smell dirty black and soak up the sun to burning underneath our jelly-sandaled feet. The two smartest girls in the class, we know, from excessive smiley faces and gold foil star stickers on every test, every project. Everyone else just bores us. Larisa is unquestionably a good influence on me: she wears angora cardigans, ribbon bows in her hair, and without fail has her favorite crumbly Bonne Bell Cherry Cola lip balm slipped in her jeans pocket, though she hates soda. She sporadically convinces me to play house and secretary inside and to wash my hands before I eat the orange Big Stick I buy from the always-unexpected ice cream truck, even though it‘s so much trouble to go inside and then outside again just for a popsicle. Matching Halloween costumes in first grade, also her idea.
She tells me we’ll be you know, like fifties girls. Wait, like what girls? And with her dominating tone, girls from the fifties, with the cute socks you know? Oh, okay, and the roll-up jeans? A little stronger now, no, you know, like poodle skirts. Larisa swishes her hands around her in circles and grins. We grease back my one-year-old brother‘s wispy hair and wrap him in a tiny black jacket, and make my parents wait on the sidewalk with his stroller when we ring doorbells and fill our old pillowcases (mine is Ninja Turtles and Larisa’s is My Little Pony) with candy and, what, pennies? who gives pennies?
We have a lemonade stand in the springs and summers, but I don’t know what we spend our money on. Cars pull in and out of her circular driveway every hot afternoon, one after another after another. When we run out of the one pitcher of lemonade we made from the Country Time powdered mix and cold tap water, we sell apple juice and chocolate milk, and whatever else we can find in her family’s fridge.
When Larisa is absent from school, I have no friends, and I am forced to amuse myself; after a week of solitude, I have exhausted all resources, so I reluctantly walk the three hot blocks from Woodlake Elementary’s far-back playground to her house.
Her mother answers the door with susie, larisa has the chickenpox. hmm. oh. An excuse at least. She must expect me to leave, but I don’t, so have you had the chickenpox? what is the right answer? no… Her eyebrows lower; that must not have been right. dang. hmm. well, I suppose you can come in and see her, but just don’t get too close. And, okay. More clarification, chickenpox is very contagious. And, okay.
Larisa’s lying in bed, and looking rather normal and not very sick at all, I think; she’s playing with her treasured porcelain doll collection that always slightly annoys me. She dresses each doll and brushes their hair, then lines them up on the lacy comforter of her four-poster bed in order from her most favorite to least. She is rearranging them in their line when I walk in, sliding along the wall like a mosquito, sticking close to the fingerprint-blurred mirrored closet doors on the opposite side of the room. I play with her the entire afternoon, and I never get the chickenpox.
Only when we are at our most desperate do Larisa and I decide to explore the broken chain-link boundary behind her house that leads to the neighbor’s what? farm? Mocking, you can’t have a farm here, and shooting back, well, he does. Larisa doesn’t lie because when she tries she always blushes dark pink, so I assume that she‘s just innocently mistaken. She can read my expression and grabs my hand, come on. i’ll have to show you, then.
We’re climbing the neighbor’s steep driveway and sneaking along the side of the fence; not quite a not a farm, but there is a red-painted chicken coup and two horses grazing noisily in the yard. Larisa loves horses; for her fifth birthday, her parents rent a pony for rides in their front yard, in addition to towers of wrapped and ribboned boxes. I put dandelions in tiny braids in my hair until she (finally) tires of watching them gorge themselves on suburban backyard house grass. This is becoming habit, our daily afternoon schedule, she chooses something and then I, each suffering through the other’s good time; more labored, more tedious.
By high school, past school changes and moves, losing phone numbers and running into friends of friends and so many oh so how is shes, we will barely smile at one another in the halls. She will be ninth grade homecoming princess and captain of freshman drill team, while I’ll know every shady corner and unnoticed alcove behind every staircase; the seagulls unavoidably perched around my spots will just panic girls like Larisa, for fear of ending up like April Johnson during softball practice, thick white spray in her strawberry-blond-curled-even-though-I’m-playing-sports hair that will make me laugh for days, especially in inappropriate settings, whenever it comes to mind.


III.

Andy is sitting next to me. He has sandy brown Malibu beach hair parted neatly down the middle, gigantic t-shirt has bright illustrations of Looney Toons characters wearing shorts like his, grazing his crew socks. His. However, I don’t notice any of this, because I have fallen asleep on the six thirty five a.m. bus to San Jose Elementary School, my head leaned against the cold latched window, legs stuck to the indescribably colored vinyl seats. Eight years old and an hour and a half commute to and from school every day; I won’t be bored anymore and magnet schools are different.
When I wake up, Andy is gone, and the only reason I know he was ever there is his introduction to me when I get off the bus last, in front of my new school, hi. So, uh, hi. wait. was he talking to me? i’m andy. i sat next to you on the bus but, like, you were asleep so you probably didn’t know that. oh god. i’m susie.
He is my savior, the escape from elementary school morality. Andy listens to rap (which I categorically detest, in favor of Paul and John and those two whose names I can’t remember), shoplifts (only candy bars, they don’t notice if you’re quick) and curses like a sailor. He scrawls graffiti on any object that comes near his grimy eight-year-old hands. I see him draw on the back of the bus seat in front of ours once, and watch his movements closely. Three vertical lines, evenly spaced. Three more, evenly spaced below. He connects the lines with a series of diagonals. It takes me a few moments to realize that he has drawn a sort of angular S.
what’s that for? Andy jumps a little, because I haven’t spoken to him since he sat down next to me. He pauses to think of justification for someone else’s absurd symbol he’s stolen and tried to make his own. for 'shorty'. And oh-so naively, I’ll regret it for days - who’s that? He almost smiles. uh. His tone is patronizing, I already realize my mistake. me. Andy is rather short, but I find the obviously self-proclaimed nickname hilarious. it looks like a braid. It does. shut up, it doesn’t. I smile a little, trying to cover up the shame that my pink cheeks surely give away, and refrain from further comment.
Andy‘s greatest exploit is his womanizing. One day during our painfully short recess, he holds a girlfriend contest. to all girls, he announces, meet outside at the benches. The benches have uneven metal legs and cracked plastic covers the color of the tapioca pudding Lena always has at lunch. Every girl stands on the benches, lined up against the blue-painted bungalow for the third grade classroom, but I stand next to Andy on the asphalt below them.
no. And he’s back with, oh shit, come on. But no. And i wont involve myself. This, a phrase I have heard my father use when my mother and I fight. Andy laughs and I realize how small my voice is.
I leave to play tetherball alone, which I will never do again, after the ball hits me in the temple and leaves a constellation of blue and purple the size of my now cut-down ego - a ping-pong ball, maybe. It’s why wouldn’t he just pick me? and I realize that my affection for Andy does not resemble the kind I feel for other boys, like James, who has a healing puncture wound in his forearm from a sharpened pencil incident that Timothy was consequently expelled for. I see Andy across the yard, kissing Lena on her freckled cheeks and holding her hand, and my bruise throbs.
The losing competitors stand in a circle, trying to brush off Lena’s rather obvious victory, as the contest took only four minutes; I walk toward them but, what?, I am not allowed in this group either. They resent my non-participation; I am too conceited, or more simply, I suck. They even make a song about it, but their voices are poorly organized and the tune dies quickly.
Andy still considers us best friends; I discover this the next day when, once again, he sits down next to me on the morning bus. I am listening to the Animal Farm book on tape on my Walkman, because my mother says it is good for me; we rarely read in school, even at this new (and better?) magnet, usually only when my teacher falls asleep at her desk after lunch do I remove my beloved James and the Giant Peach from my backpack. I ignore my friend until he pushes me into the corrugated metal under the window. He must have noticed my book.
you are such a dork, susie.
This will not be the last girlfriend contest, or the last time Andy surprises me with the extent of his loyalty. Nor, however, will this be my last so obviously unrequited love; simply the first in a long train to follow. Andy will go to jail ten years later for armed robbery. The last thing he will tell me, when I see him at our fifth grade graduation, is that I look nice with my hair up. I will wear it like that until I forget how to spell his last name, something long and Italian and problematic, that once graced the cardstock cover of every one of my spiral-bound notebooks.


IV.

Kendall is picking me up off the playground blacktop with one long tanned arm as I blow in short hard breaths on my scraped knee; I am apprehensive because she was the one who pushed me down in the game of three flies up kickball. Three weeks earlier, she had taught me every curse word in English, and a few in Spanish, and I use a couple while wiping sharp rocks and dripping blood off of my leg. She takes me to the nurse’s office, after single-handedly halting the game for my sake.
She has toast-color skin, perfect almond eyes, a tiny sloping nose, and corkscrew bronze hair cut to three inches all over her head; she is gorgeous, despite her erratic cruelty. My friend Chrissie will be the first to finally admit this, six years later, remember that mulatto girl? her name started with a C sound, you know? I remember everything so, oh, kendall? Quickly, yeah, that’s her. she was like a fucking bitch. but she was really beautiful too. I consider her sincerity. we were friends when I first got to san jose. Pause. that’s weird. And another, while I wonder where she is now. yeah.
Kendall is constantly trying to convince us that she is adopted, but no one can believe her; the physical resemblance to her abusive father is too striking, and later, she’ll also mirror maternal bi-polar tendencies. This adoptive couple take us to the Los Angeles County Fair in the spring of third grade; it is an arranged playdate that my own parents must at least partially organize, and I don’t really mind, because of the infrequency and instability of my few current friendships. Kendall and I forge a delicate familiarity over mutual hatred of the 4H Club animals, and instead eat sticky pink cotton candy from white cardboard sticks and ride the ferris wheel, giggling and kicking our legs to rock the seats, to avoid the petting zoo nightmare at the other end of the fairgrounds.
Midway through the fourth grade, small objects start to go missing from desks and backpacks: plastic pencil boxes with fickle buttons to open tiny hidden compartments, favorite new brightly colored markers, half-full packs of Juicy Fruit gum, even whole brown paper bag lunches. Weeks go by, the thefts a mystery, until Lena sees her broken charm bracelet in Kendall’s flannel jacket pocket.
detention, suspension, expulsion.
I’m sitting next to Kendall on a bench under a low shady tree in June, and I think she’s crying, but I can‘t tell, her long thin hands at her face. For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, I am not angry or even disappointed in her; I am the eye of the storm, cooler, calmer than normal.
I guess I should ask are you okay? Her head jerks up. oh. yyeah. So, yeah, well. I can’t look her in the eye. why can’t I look her in the eye? yeah. I sit down next to her and say I’m sorry to the ground. it’s okay. then she gets up she walks away.
Kendall will not be expelled, suspended for a week, but something unspoken yet understood ruins our friendship. In the fifth grade, some of the more popular girls start an Anti-Kendall Club, and, through some surely underhanded scheming, persuade her to join, passing it off as another group. I tell her the truth and she shoots me a cold but self-conscious glare.
fuck you.
There are black marker messages written about her on the blue bathroom walls, accompanied by phone numbers with downtown area codes with 3's and 2's that I’m sure aren’t hers. She eats lunch by herself and I secretly hate myself for not sitting with her, though I know I’d have to weather the fuck you’s for forty-two long, exact minutes, because I wouldn’t have the sense to walk away.
Her mother makes frequent visits to school, under the guise of helping our class make a miniature city out of recyclables. She is a stone-faced social worker with permanent forehead wrinkles, and follows Kendall’s every move, sometimes even making notes once or twice, looking back and forth between a pad of paper and her only daughter. She checks Kendall’s locker in middle school (for what?) almost weekly. She pulls every item out one at a time, Kendall leaning against a trashcan, the coordinator looking on excitedly (jesus… is she really hoping to find something?), but the searches never yield any explanatory clear Ziploc bags of powder or pills, or guns or knives or even condoms. Justifications, reasons for something they can't understand. Kendall is so deeply humiliated, she doesn’t even bother claiming that she’s adopted anymore; she rarely speaks to anyone long enough to give such an explanation.
Kendall will drop out of high school to model in New York at seventeen, without finishing high school. I won’t see her after middle school, but a friend of mine, who will die in the city eight months later under a sports utility vehicle, will relate to me running into her on the subway. She tries to steal his wallet, her stomach swelled by five months of pregnancy, and raised marks on the creamy inside of the arm she reaches out toward his back pocket.


V.

Chrissie has the biggest breasts in the fourth grade, or the fifth and sixth grades, for that matter. They dominate over the rest of our tiny pouches of skin carefully folded into stretchy triangles of soft fabric (it is not a training bra); she needs under wires. I am fascinated by her, and not because of the cleavage I won’t match until high school, or the strappy platform shoes that make her almost a foot taller than me, and not even because her Jewish mother named her Chrissie Christensen, but because she devours books even faster than I do.
speed-reading classes she tells me one day when I ask how she finished Weetzie Bat in two days. She loans it to me and I match her, but only by staying up until midnight and battling nausea on the bus the next morning to get through the last chapters.
We start a newspaper for our elementary school: one legal-sized sheet of paper, cleverly titled Here’s the Scoop. We are made to include two younger girls on our staff so that the paper won’t be so one-sided; more often than not, we unintentionally drive them to teary trips to the coordinator’s office (schools of eighty don’t have principals?).
As a kind of self-serving appeasement, we invite one of the girls to be in our talent show act, a song and dance to a very appropriate Brady Bunch song, something or something else about sunshine coming our way. Chrissie is Marcia, I am Jan, and Danielle, the girl from the newspaper, is Cindy. At a break in the music, I say the infamous words Marcia Marcia Marcia and flip my long straw-blond hair, and everyone laughs.
It is Chrissie’s idea, at the beginning of the fifth grade, to make our own version of the Babysitter’s Club, whose fictional lives we had memorized after reading our favorite soda-stained copies for the fifth and sixth times. Chrissie deems herself Dawn, the tall, beautiful hippie character. I constantly forget mine, but it is surely the most off-beat and boyish of the group; the one overlooked by all the attractive male characters with their learner’s permits, except maybe the nice audio-visual near sighted boy with a manageable skin problem and mismatched socks. We have mock meetings (and membership cards?). The club breaks up a couple of months after it is created, which is almost a couple of months after we lose interest.
After teachers begin threatening us with lunch detentions for talking in class, Chrissie and I switch to writing notes. By the end of the day, I have an entire pocket of my huge backpack devoted to whatever half was shoved into the under-side metal pocket of my desk. This rather casual system of storage leads to several embarrassing incidents of notes becoming lodged in math books later opened in front of crushes. Finally, we allocate the whole of an 80-page college-ruled spiral bound to our prematurely cynical musings and complaints. Mine are usually about my long-haired neighbor not noticing when I skateboard in front of his house and almost (I was so, so close) into his driveway; Chrissie’s are usually on the subject of Andy.
he’s so fine. I’ve only heard Andy use the word, so I laugh at her, because uh, duh. he’s a guy. And then uh, duh. Now I’m confused. well, I mean, guys can’t be fine. only girls can. An exasperated sigh, flip of thick hair. Condescending tone in her big-toothed voice. no, susie, guys can be fine too. oh. oh. Chrissie is doing her best to teach me the ways of the world, and taking much pride, I think, in the progress I’ve made.
she’s so fine. I see Andy looking at Chrissie as we stand in the cafeteria line. what? um, who?
They are officially going out (where do they go?) a week later, and maybe I never recover, as Chrissie puts me in the same friend position so many times over the next years. I see them go off behind buildings together, and come back wiping their lips; they choose each other as partners for projects, and I am put with Jason Randall, who smells like pastrami and never washes his hair. Two years later, three seventh graders from my bus who Chrissie plays spin the bottle with will steal the supply of dissection frogs from the biology lab, and fill Jason’s locker with them; he will transfer schools, and no one will miss him, but Chrissie will always answer his rambling e-mails.
She will move before high school, and I visit her only twice; she will join a band, but quit a few months later, after being involved with the bassist and singer. She’ll start dating the guitarist of a rival band. They’ll get their GED’s and take community college classes together while I am still a never-been-kissed high school sophomore. They will move in together by the summer after my high school graduation, and I will visit their condo in the suburban depths of Encino Village. Chrissie will look much older, and refuse to tell me where she works (a place a lot of girls work when they don‘t, you know, have a lot on their resumes); her boyfriend will have a beer in hand and his eyes glued to his (my?) shoes. Chrissie will clench her teeth and ask him something about the car, and he’ll disappear for a couple of hours.
I’m wary, but, have you seen andy lately? I wonder how he is, you know? A pause. I can hear Chrissie think. And finally sorry, who?

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