Sunday, March 27, 2011

Small Relevant Fictions Until They Sink In

Pria Mara with razor-burn up and across her thighs. Pria Mara sighs. It's the only way to breathe deep. Pria Mara can't sleep. She's fake, though, so, no...worries.

And what had she wanted to say earlier in the shower (the shower was a perfect metaphor...it was only ever too hot or not quite hot enough)? Oh yes. The blinking bold cliche of Sunday night. Smoking a Parliament inside a Bank of America ATM portal, frantically waving down cabs in a weary city. Weary is key. She'd been sleepy. And he'd been kind. He hadn't known her last name. He'd actually uttered the words, "I'm not looking for anything serious" before not walking her to the door. People are complicated. She always assumed. But in that paradigm, who to resent -- the Tom Cruise-or-similar perps, the pioneers? The "culture, man" with its invisibility, it smells like burned bagels, rank. Or thinking wider PM and all the feelings she notes the conspicuous lack of, all the thoughts she hates to find coda. No. It isn't any different. Not with sweet kisses, not with big heavy sighs, not BEING TOUCHED at all. That wasn't the most fun part. And lo, she's lost the most fun part, anticipating this alleged most fun part. Let's settle on "culture, man." Track the bastard down, we'll have a trial.

This is not the low point of her life. This is exactly what it sounds like. Travel like Goldilocks, seek and steal and care enough. So much work to jerk. Static, lazy little sentences. Blurts. This is what I got:

You’re an alien to basics, motherfucker. You’re a shrimp. Don’t be a wump chump, put pen to paper and slide I mean let-it-all-slide down. I’m talking to you, look hard at my face. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Are you experienced? Hop to it, dope.
Here’s the gimmick. Here’s the secret. No one will ever really ask too much of you. No one will ever know how to ask you for something you can’t give. Maybe I should rephrase: no one can be crueler to you than your own personal self, genius. No one else will know your weak points. No one else’s mind can throw you around like your own. There’s a lot of songs -- a LOT of songs -- people sing about ‘my own worst enemy’, realized in their own personal self, of course, you know what that means without friggity frack frack Black Tar or Ice, I know you do. You’re smart. I can see it in your cool beans. That will hurt, kid. It hurts to be smart. Being smart will always alert you to what you don’t know, and eventually to what you can’t know. Us dummies live in the shadows. We have more fun in the dark. You ever read that Plato short story? It’s like that. We like the dark. It’s all like chess, it’s all like a sacrifice, you decide what to get turned on to, you get turned on. Obvious oblivion or sharp, flinty tumors. Yeah. You know. I’m repeating myself, you know.
If you’re using any of this, I want a Mercedes Benz from your first million doll-hairs. Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz! Ha!

Colin was writing the graduation speech. He’d been hand-selected by a board of student council members and teachers to do it. That was how it worked at his school, you didn’t even apply -- a secret, somewhat anonymous board got together after hours and just yanked some hapless senior out of the yearbook. Well, he figured there was more to it than that, but it was still a strange choice -- Colin didn’t get especially good grades. He was well-liked but not the best-liked. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t an athlete, he didn’t have a lot of hot mamas following him around all the time. He drove a Trans Am.

Fat lot of good it did the kid, the girl, sitting on piles of unwashed laundry (do your laundry add LAUNDRY to your grand poobah to do-list) waiting for the Joe to call, the Caroline to call, the Art Garfunkel to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone. A lot of life was waiting. Pria met Uncle Jethro on line at the gas station buying his weekly cocktail of Crest toothpaste, two-count-em-two Lotto tickets one bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos and a Corona 40 for the left hand, a tall boy Bud for the right. “I’m balanced, like the law.” Sometimes he also bought a wad of skunky chewing tobacco but she’d never seen him swallow.

Pria Mara lived down the road from Uncle Jethro and Colin, on the crest of the hill where the block visibly started to improve. She lived by a Neighborhood Watch sign and around a mailbox coalition -- little ladies with mailboxes, they had a coalition, who knew? Pria Mara was the solo endeavor and single fruit of the loins of Paola and Gussie Mara. Her parents were quiet people. They listened to Edith Piaf on a quiet turntable, quietly cutting vegetables as the season permitted. They were good at silently exerting a will that often left Pria guilty. She could feel, for instance, their hollow disappointment waft through the kitchen (guised as garlic) the afternoon she told them “The Grad Board picked Colin Culkey to deliver the speech, not me.”
“Aren’t your grades quite a bit better than his?” her mother asked.
“It’s not just about grades.”
And: “Mmm.”
It was like sex. You just got used to it.

Did they know each other? Did they know know each other? Pria and Colin had ridden the same bus to school for the better part of ten big years. Their little points of eye contact could be counted on one hand, the words exchanged eight digits tops. He and Uncle Jethro had moved in down the block at some untraceable, unmemorable moment -- she couldn’t remember. Colin Culkey not a threat. Colin Culkey flew low below the radar. Pria Mara was a schooled soul, she cared about grades and extracurriculars. They’d carpooled on a school trip to a reconstructed eighteenth century village in the tenth grade. They’d played the license plate game and gossiped harmlessly and it had meant very little, quite little. They smiled in greeting.

Did she think he was a thick wedge of man cheese? Couldn’t say. She didn’t keep a diary.
On Graduation day, Pria Mara wore a white dress because that’s what all the girls had been asked to put on beneath their robes. Her parents kissed her perfunctorily getting into the car, getting out of the car and just as soon as they got a hold of her with diploma in hand. It had been a boring ceremony. For the Principal’s Talk and the dreaded Choral Segment she’d been picking gunk out from beneath her fingernails. When Colin Culkey stood to deliver the student address, she’d run out of fingers.
“I owe my Uncle Jethro my first million dollars for what I’m about to say,” he’d begun. This had gotten a laugh. Pria thought the timing was weird, that the laugh was preemptive and planted and perhaps tonally inappropriate. “It’s very hard to live inside mistakes. It’s so hard that most people on this planet labor in service of ignoring or obliterating them. Mistakes.” Colin Culkey wiped some nervous sweat from the rim of his mortar cap. It was very sweet to Pria. He looked at home in the words he’d chosen, like someone in their Saturday lounge pants.
After the ceremony was over, Pria looked for Colin, to tell him something about what she’d thought. She hovered behind Uncle Jethro for a moment before her parents swooped in, but realized just as space before Colin cleared that she had nothing to say really, they weren’t friends.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Important Scientific Research

Fatalism. I have a lot to say about dating, I have words to yell and punch and absorb. And I have to tell you about it. This isn’t a diary because I have to tell you about it, I need you to breathe this same air and be as confused.
I just finished Muriel Barbery’s book The Elegance of the Hedgehog this morning; this is a book about small beauty and people looking for connection and loneliness. It’s really lovely and I recommend you read it. That’s one.
But mostly, this weekend starting Thursday, I’ve been running a kind of experiment -- its genesis comes from watching way too much Sex and the City and spending time looking for truth in that fiction. I tried to blitzkrieg my skin, certain habits, postures and attitudes, facial expressions and quirks. I went out on three different nights imitating another kind of girl (the kind on Sex and the City) because there is a limited amount of external locus rationale that can satisfy an intelligent single woman. I wore a red dress, and later a hickey, and later a green dress, and I nodded and smiled and let myself float on tides and act real un-classy in a few different places I can probably never return to again.
Did no one ever tell you that dating is bizarre? That hooking up in bars is bizarre? There is nothing natural at all about either experience. Let's switch, you'll see. Go.

You’re on a date. You’re trying to hold on to your person, I mean your purse, it’s an uphill battle. You think you know what the other brain-attached-to-mouth is thinking but are far too afraid to suggest this with your own face. People hand you things in cans and bottles and slowly the walls erode and the worl blurs, becomes a painting of rain. And here you stand on an opened continent with what could be an open heart -- do you remember from before? Did it feel like this?
He doesn’t touch you until all the cliché cornerstones have been covered (do you want to come back to my place for a while? Do you want to hang out in my room?). The points of contact are not quite electric, contain no seismic charge, but they’re nice. It’s a surprise that being with someone else can just be nice. It seems like it ought to be both more and less amazing at the same time; the gentle mediocrity is a bracing reminder that you’re a) no angel and b) no prototype.
Sleeping is the best. Never mind what you tell the girls later. He’s a good sleeper, and he seems to like exploring you gently even if he says nothing and you very rarely find your eyes touching. It’s another surprise that this part, the timid tiptoe towards dawn, is unwelcome in a way. It’s not so awkward to be watched putting underwear on, it’s not so vile to kiss someone else with morning mouth, it’s best to be asked “are you sure you have to leave right now?” And nice, nice, nice, like sweet white silk, like little old ladies, like smiles across space -- this has been nice. No one’s earth is shattered, maybe gently rocked. It’s easy to be brave.
Of course it’s also easy to start wishing, even as early as Chambers Street, that this had been more than nice. This is no epiphany and it’s not a loss, but there’s work ahead, you see. Love is rare. And it must be real, if only because the word ‘nice’ exists.
But how fine to simmer in a magnificent You, a WOMAN capable of self-preservation and contact and very low-stakes smalltalk. Walk that walk of shame, sashay that walk of shame, giggle and titter at You, misunderstand You, marvel at You. Bat away small longing for an idea of a mother you’ve never known -- not because the real thing isn’t fabulous, but because you’re up to imagining. Fight off impulses to braid your hair in pigtails and rewind whole reams of years like the Willy Wonka VHS we needed to replace twice. Brush your teeth instead. Live instead. If you don’t live like this, you’ll die like that, and while that’s not OBJECTIVELY the worst case scenario no one wants to do the subtraction.
And in bed, now, you, me, sit with a cell phone very close because you never know who you’ll have reeled in for keeps. Maybe the GUY FROM THE BAR (and yet, how laughable. People don't MEET people in BARS, do they??) who left a mark on your neck but called you to make sure you were home safe, said he liked you, said he ‘had a good feeling about you’, even told you he loved you (drunk) and walked you all the way up to the train doors closing. Maybe the smiley gentleman who bought you a fine dinner and made for fine conversation but bid you goodbye in the rain anyways, an hour later, anyways. Archetypes. Maybe the boy who’s arms you woke up in, who seemed sort of humorless but liked all the same books, who kissed you very gently.
To demonstrate a metaphor, please understand me: we can be close and cold, we can be brave and foolish, it can all be hilariously easy or wildly complicated. Try to tell your own stories to your own friends. Nod at one another so it’s clear you understand. But no one understands (I mean, people rarely understand) because there is air between even the cells in your own body. And I begin to wonder if understanding is the point, if fulfillment of a supposed want is the point, if there is a point, what is the point. You looking for skin? Can be done. You want dinner, you want Rolodex names? Cake. You looking for an earth shaker? Seems you could wait and fare just the same, that is if ‘settling’ for you is one of the first two. And of course ‘settling’ becomes compounded by stakes. Could you die alone? Would you? It won’t be your choice in an obvious way, but…you know.
And it takes a very specific kind of person to even consider the prospect of dying alone before they turn twenty-six, it does, John Cusack, I hear ya. It takes a very specific kind of person to consider why we think this prospect is so scary. It takes specific people to believe in love and enjoy blind dates and read certain authors and drink certain drinks -- there’s your argument for the six billion. We’re not the same, none of us, we don't even want the same things. That's a grapple. That's a bitch. So what am I doing with you? What do I want from you? Why should I wait for you?