I Live Here Now

Last night, I was planning on taking it easy, trying make headway on the stories I've been working on, and seeing if I could spend an entire evening in my apartment without making nachos.

I did not have a chance to fail that little self-imposed test.

Instead, my roommate was performing in a lounge show at one of our favorite venues and said he could get me in and that there would be drinks and that they would be free. I know that lately the girl who is working out for a year without buying gym memberships is getting a bad rap, but I understand her [and love her punny blog headline]. Living in New York is expensive. Whereas she has become creative and enterprising with her lack of funds, I have just taken to doing pilates on the [carpeted] floor of my living room.

What I'm trying to say here is: if it's free, it's me.

Adding to the price fitting the bill, this show was also a 60th Birthday party for Karen Carpenter. They were singing from The Carpenters songbook and I didn't know much about them. I remember the Behind the Music episode, knew about the whole eating disorder thing, and thought they were married. What I learned was that they were NOT married, they were siblings - which I suppose explains away their creepily similar marionette-esque faces. I learned that you will get in trouble with the Carpenters diehards if you refer to the music as anything but "prog rock." So I go, and while I had never been a fan, you better believe I was singing along to the chorus of this song:

[Can we just take a minute to fully appreciate the absurdity of the video's epitaph? Can you even make it that far?]

Yes, there were recorders, there were at least four women with the Karen bouffant and floor length flowy dresses, there were in-poor-taste [pun so intended] anorexia references, and there were drinks and they were free. This is where I get in trouble.

Moments are returning to me: my roommate and I sitting in the audience rocking out to a really good cover, a 60 year old woman sitting on his lap, discussing the politics of Catholic school and FTM transsexuals with a gorgeous girl with a bleached mohawk and pearls who was in the dressing room waiting for the next show to start, which was a burlesque tribute to Pulp Fiction [no, I am not kidding] and the girls called themselves "The Tarantinas" [I really couldn't make this stuff up], me asking a friend of my roommate's [who I had just met and who works for a very notable TV station in a very real capacity] how much time he needed to fire his current assistant before he wanted me to start working [oh my god, did I really say that? Yes, I did.]

And then, of course, puking all over our front sidewalk with a force and a volume that I thought was not possible to achieve after receiving your undergraduate diploma. It was embarrassing, it was painful, and it laid me out on my back for most of the day.

This morning, though, upon waking up and discovering that my life had not, in fact, ended, I saw a text message I had sent a friend in some fleeting moment of clarity last night. It said: i puked all over oure [sic] front sidewalk. i live here now. And, although I much would have preferred to keep my dinner to myself, it was one of those times where I really believed that to be true.

Is it wrong ...

to suggest to someone you are on a date with that they may be a better fit for someone else you used to date?

"If I Can Make It There..."

Me: Do you like my new haircut?

Paul: Yeah. It's very "New York."

Me: It's just like my old haircut, but messier.

Paul: Exactly.

Titanic as Life Metaphor

[I wrote this essay back in October for a blog project. I am posting the original here even though, you know, a few things have happened since then.]

Alright, I had some illusions surrounding the train. It was more glamorous than the bus, more economical than flying. I thought it would be romantic—a relic of a bygone era, like in the old black and white movies—jazz musicians and men in fedoras and sensible women reading fashion magazines. It made me think of words like ‘rendezvous’ and ‘intrigue.’ What I found instead was a platoon of iPods at full volume, huge men who should have been required to pay for two tickets, and blatantly breastfeeding women. It brought to mind phrases like ‘get me out of here’ and very specific and very attainable thoughts of homicide.

In this fantasy version of moving to New York that I had in my mind, I would arrive at the station and swing around my bags and make bold declarations like, “HERE I AM, NEW YORK!” or “I HAVE ARRIVED!” I would be wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The closest thing I have to the visual in my mind is this scene from the 1997 feature film Titanic:

My actual arrival in New York, hatless and with bags packed so full they could hardly be carried effectively, much less swung around, actually resembled more closely another scene from that movie about the fated ocean liner:

[It should be noted here that I do not own either of those images. Twentieth Century-Fox does. I don’t own anything. I don’t even officially own my IKEA bed until I pay off my credit card balance, which looks like it will happen sometime between awhile and never]

I found myself in Penn Station with my four bags of varying shapes and weights that made it virtually impossible for me to carry all of them myself. Whereas a more conscientious person would have ensured that their bags fit together like Tetris blocks, able to be stacked and interlocked and perfect, my bags looked like they had been stolen from other travelers—a bright blue duffel bag [sans shoulder strap], an overstuffed American Tourister [complete with 1 ¾ wheels], an orange, hard-shelled suitcase from the 1980s or before and a Swiss Army backpack [although I have never been hiking in my life].

I had a brief nightmare, standing at baggage claim, of trying to navigate my cargo and myself to Brooklyn alone. I exhausted all of the options I could think of—from hiring that guy who was bathing himself in the bathroom sink to help me carry them, to finding the closest post office and shipping a few to my new address—and finally, in the fever dream induced by the sixteen hour train ride combined with the fact that it was the hottest day that New York would see in September [keep this fact in mind. It will helpful to know later], I reached the conclusion that it actually made the most sense for me to step back, assess the content of each bag, decide which I valued least and just leave it there. Sacrifice it to the gods of Penn Station. This is the frame of mind I was operating within at this point.

Luckily, it never came to that. Gregg—the guy that I was dating at the time and who, on this occasion, saved at least my material life—met me at the station and we rode the escalator out of the belly of Penn Station and into the light.

When trying to catch a cab from Penn Station to Brooklyn, I’ve learned that what cab drivers will do is laugh. And laugh. And keep laughing. And drive away. Laughing. So we braved the subway, pinned down by the luggage that is my life [or, my life edited for New York purposes].

This is the part where it comes in handy to remember that this day was the hottest September day in New York this year.

There is only one word and it is: sweaty. Here we are, two relatively attractive, certainly clean-ish looking guys dripping in sweat. Sweat running down our faces; sweat pooling at our feet. You get the picture. We were certifiably the two most disgusting people on that train. And there were homeless people on that train.

We arrived at my apartment to find that the lights didn’t work and the toilet wouldn’t flush. Gregg made a comment about The Money Pit and laughed and I crumpled to the living room floor and cried. I slept right there on the floor that night; I had yet to brave the Red Hook IKEA to find a bed I could almost afford and all of the furniture had left with the roommate I was replacing. It might sound ridiculous, and maybe it is, but I hadn’t really thought of what I would do once I got here, beyond the answers I would give to family members and acquaintances, full of “hitting the ground running on the job search” and other overused, overconfident metaphors.

Now, a month into my new city, reflecting for the sake of this blog, and with the photo of Leo and Kate struggling against the water staring back at me from my computer desktop, I wonder if that photo may not serve as some sort of overused and perhaps overconfident metaphor itself. It has been a month of days spent applying to jobs that I always seem to be over- or under-qualified for, sending my resume and cover letters out into what usually feels like a gaping black hole, days of being lonelier than I have ever been, feeling so far away from everything, days of fearing I might go the way of Emily Dickinson [in terms of reclusiveness, not poetic renown], things ending with Gregg, phone calls home that have to be filled with good news even if there isn’t any.

And maybe [okay, certainly] this photo has to be looked out completely out of the context of the movie as a whole—Spoiler alert: Celine Dion sings. Kate Winslet gets naked. Leo dies. Old Kate Winslet throws the necklace in the water at the end—but there have been many times during this first month where life has felt like that: water up to my neck and rising, but I’m still kicking like hell. Leo dies, Kate lives. I’ll take a 50% chance of survival over nothing. Maybe one day I’ll go under, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t know if that is the moral of this story. I don’t know if there is a moral to this story. What I do know is the next morning, after that first night spent on the floor, without any logical reason, the toilet decided to flush and the lights came back on.

The Mediocre Date, or Carson McCullers is a Little Bitch

Last night I was on a mediocre date. These things happen. It was not the first and, despite all attempts at prevention, will probably not be the last. The Mediocre Date should not be confused with its evil sister, The Awful Date. I have had a few of those as well. So have you, probably. The mediocre dates should just be able to fall away, to end when they end, to have that be that. No harm, no foul. And parts of it were great. I got to see The Hurt Locker. He paid. We had things to talk about. It just wasn't ... good. The x factor wasn't there. No one's fault. It was so harmless that I might even be willing to accept the fault, if he wanted to push it onto me the way some people do. Maybe I was not interesting enough, maybe it takes a certain kind of person to have a not-mediocre date with me. Shrug of the shoulders and move on.

However, this mediocre date was different, in that he managed to say the cruelest thing that anyone has ever said to me. He said: You know, Carson McCullers was 23 when she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

This is after I told him that I had just started reading the book, that I was 23 myself, and had told him that I spend most of my free time making up stories on my laptop and one day might want to see if anything could come of them.

And I knew this, of course, that this little bitch McCullers was published at 23 to great acclaim. It is on the book. I knew this and already hated her for it, the same way I hate Joyce Carol Oates because she says she edits while on brisk jogs near her home. [Although, one time, when a lot of my crazy friends were coming to me with their crazy dating issues and I was considering putting together an essay collection called Your Slightly More Stable Friend Has A Few Things to Say About Your Non-Relationship, I decided that all I wanted, more than money or success or accolades, was a jacket blurb from JCO saying, It's like He's Just Not That Into You ... but good!]

The world was smaller then, I tell myself. When Carson McCullers was writing. Doesn't it seem like that, in old movies? Or when reading old books? That the world was just so much smaller? That there were so many less people? That everyone knew everyone? New York seems like a little village, like it could fit inside Central Park. So it must have been a lot easier to get published back then, since there were - what? like, three people writing. She just had to show up at a publishing house, with that starved, haggard look on her face [you've seen the cover!], hand them her stack of a manuscript, collapse at their feet, and she was in.

This is of course not true.

This is of course me speaking from the fact that I am turning 24 in two months and haven't had my novel published, that I don't even have a novel that could even be considered for publication anywhere. I am 23 and the extent of my writing "career" has been an undergraduate prize and a story about the Grand Canyon published in my school's literary magazine where the Grand Canyon represented the protagonist because, like, you know, people have layers. Don't look for it. I'm thinking enough time has passed, that it may not even be around anymore. Unless, of course, you stop by my parent's house and find the ten copies they have; one that, against my will and better judgment, I agreed to sign. SIGN! Ugh.

And I have been trying give him the benefit of the doubt, this Mediocre Date. Maybe he was trying to say that each of us, even at 23, has the potential within us to write or paint or do something great. I do not think that this is what he meant. But I don't think he meant the opposite, either, in which his statement is followed, in my head, by: and what the fuck have you done? I think it was just a statement, something he had heard somewhere and, for whatever reason, retained. Maybe because he, himself, is 23. That he was sharing with me without motive, simply because he knew it. Our previous conversation had suggested that maybe he didn't know very many things and when the chance arose to share some piece of accurate information, by god, he was going to take it.

It was also on Friday that I read in The Daily Rumpus that Hal Ashby [Harold and Maude, Shampoo] didn't really begin directing films until he was 38. A precedent has been set for late bloomers. I have nothing to worry about. 23 is not old.

That's good and fine, but at the time, what did I do? I did not handle the situation with grace. I decided that I would not be paying for dinner, told him [an aspiring actor] "Well, Tatum O'Neill won an Academy Award when she was, like, 11" [IMDB: "10"], and decided that this Mediocre Date was so over.