To Be or Naught

When I was maybe thirteen I closed myself in my bedroom, put on my new Jimi Hendrix album, stood on the side of my bed frame and did this crazy deep breathing alternating with challenging breath-holding... it was like a prescription a girl at school had given me-- to make myself faint. I woke up to the last song on the album.. I must have blacked out for thirty minutes... and felt profoundly changed, as though I'd done some mind-altering drug, or entered another reality entirely.  It was terrifying.  My mother asked me later that night what that huge sound had been... it was me, I did not say, crashing on the floor, simulating a kind of death.  I never again played with that scenario.  

A few weeks ago I ran into a woman in my neighborhood. She is familiar... I'd see her years back coming from the 92nd St Y where she swam and exercised-- with a perfect geometric haircut and coordinated outfits.  She liked her ballet flats, her accessories and pins.  We'd smile at one another-- two independent neighborhood women who lived presumably alone.  Then there was a gap-- several years-- we had different daily paths, but recently we met in the grocery store... she seemed warm and glad to see me.  She'd been isolated since the pandemic, she said.  People were no longer kind to her.  That seems impossible, I replied, knowing exactly what she meant, but trying to pry her out of some perceptible bleak mood. You look so fantastic, I said... you're so fashion-forward and well-kept. You haven't aged, I insisted.  She complimented me on my 'style' which is aging rocker/bag lady no-longer-chic, but we had a little laugh. 

Yesterday someone told me she suicided; they described her... we don't even know her name.  All these months I've been agonizing over my friend who succumbed to her brain tumor, my two beloved neighbors who are both suffering from incurable and fatal cancers. And here is this woman-- it was said she'd fallen... but then revealed that she took her life.  I don't know why I thought about my teenage blackout... but I did. 

According to statistics nearly fifty percent of Manhattan households are individuals.  This is a city of single people-- of dreamers and workers and maybe many consummate romantics who spend decades searching for a partner. As a young woman, not even out of college, I was engaged to a man who on paper satisfied every possible criterion for the perfect husband. He was handsome, too, like Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd (my favorite movie at the time)... athletic, brilliant, funny, macho, adoring, a little crazy.  And yet from the moment he put that diamond on my hand I was panicky-- looking for some flaw or crack in the human plaster. Who does this?  Insecure, self-loathing women who feel undeserving of success?  I don't know... but since he passed all tests, I began to misbehave until it became impossible.  He even tried to repair the engagement months later but I was in another headspace.

Many of my women friends made viable partnerships.  A few have wonderful marriages which exceed the sum of their parts. It's hard for single women to really understand what this requires; at our advancing age, it seems incredible to imagine someone making us coffee in the morning when we're exhausted, or embracing us at the end of a rough day.  There is no one. Children are the best-- but they really only want to know what's for dinner. And they grow up and hopefully follow their own dreams.

Throughout my adult life I've lived with men-- for better or worse. I've had two formal engagements-- and two marriages, neither of which was preceded by an engagement, neither of which was particularly successful.  One of them produced my son.  While I've followed my heart, creatively, 'managed' my decades with more passion than prudence, I was never quite 'completed' by a relationship.  The last few nights I've been thinking about how tough I was... I think I wanted to partner with someone who was a prodigy-- an inventor. I wanted to serve someone whose genius was worthy of my sacrificing any ambition I had to his.  And yet, even when I dated someone who seemed fantastic, I ripped them apart in my head-- I exaggerated the smallest fault into a reason to separate. 

But it occurs to me that I was equally hard on myself.  Sure-- I have an Ivy League education, I excelled at things-- I read, I think, I walk, I play bass, I write poetry... but I have not changed the world.  I have not left some scientific contribution or altered literature with groundbreaking talent.  At my age Anthony Trollope had been dead for years, after managing to produce twelve children and fifty three novels.  Einstein had changed modern physics. Mozart-- at less than half my age had put us all to shame. I suppose what I expected from myself I transferred to my fictional version of a partner. The possibility of this becoming a reality, especially after decades, becomes nil. 

Of course all of us women had our suitors-- the men with whom we had sex or the ones who took us to dinner and wanted to make something more... but these begin to diminish.  They themselves become fragile and sad.  The woman who suicided confided to me-- no one had reached out to her for some time.  There is no one to comfort us or pour us a drink at the end of a hard day... or a good day. We are used to this... I suppose I painted myself into this corner and I expect nothing.  But for this woman, it apparently became overwhelming-- the absence of someone. I'm not sure.

Reading the Boggs James Baldwin biography, I remember well the character in Another Country he based on his friend who jumped from the George Washington Bridge.  It haunted James who himself attempted suicide several times. Fortunately for us he was unsuccessful. In my neighborhood, over the past few months, there have been a few jumpers.  It's shocking. We'll never be sure what was in their head, whether they wanted to change their mind at the last second, when it was too late.  Unhappy people have become radicalized and transformed into alternate strong characters.  Often these mass murderers end up killing themselves.  I read the journal of a man who had survived his bridge jump, who admitted that in the instant, he was immediately sorry.

Maybe it takes a biographer to decipher our digressions and behaviors. I am trying, sifting through the unwritten messages left for me by the people I have lost, to analyze my own behavior and understand where I might have veered off my proscribed destiny.  As I write, tonight, ironically a televised biography  playing in the background about Marilyn Monroe.  I don't think I would ever throw in the proverbial towel, and I do take responsibility. It's not always easy, this life... our fate... the choices we've made versus the hand we've been dealt. There's only one version, so far, of this life.  Despite all of the barbs and potholes, I'll take it on. While I never played teenage life-and-death-roulette again, it's ironic that the soundtrack of that incident foreshadowed Jimi's own suicide.  Or not. 

There is never enough kindness in this world.  We in the city often barely speak to or know our neighbors. There is a constant existing possibility of truth or understanding between human beings, without ulterior motives.  And for those of us who find themselves solitary-- without a witness or companion, we are a bit myopic; we lack the advantage and privilege of dialogue. While Marilyn's death is still a bit of a mystery, the fact is, she died alone.  For those of us who live this daily existence, whether by choice or circumstance, we might find a way to extend a version of kindness to ourselves.

When You Dance

Years ago I had a sexual dream about Donald O'Connor.  He was wearing that horizontal striped shirt Gene Kelly wore in Anchors Aweigh. I woke up feeling hung over and baffled: not only do I dislike stripes anywhere besides bedsheets,  but my male crush-template at the time was maybe Scott Weiland.  

Over the years I've had a few iconic, memorable actual dreams that feel epic-- cinematic-- long, complicated narratives with specific settings and locations that felt like inventions-- all featuring some Hollywood actor-- Brian Keith, in one-- who had no real association with anything or anyone.  I'd wake up feeling-- well, a little surprised... but connected. In high school I'd occasionally have a random dream about some boy I barely knew and then blush when I passed him in the hallway.  Little did he know, we'd shared some private intimacy which would remain part of my psyche. 

Of course, they say the people in our dreams are substitutes, like when we dream about a neglected dog, it's actually about our self. Regardless of where these come from, there's a literal hangover-- we replay what we recall in real time; we are affected. 'A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep...' sang Cinderella on my Disney album soundtrack. Children have nightmares... the lyric was confusing.

I just finished the superb new James Baldwin biography.  James participated in the famed March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech.  MLK had not just a dream but a vision and a moral and social platform.  On a much more personal scale, my son recently realized his 'hoop-dream' of creating an urban basketball platform.  Of course this took incredibly hard work, planning and stress... fundraising, organizing, building, turning small failures into success narratives, and a coming of age. More than a dream, it's a passion he parlayed into a career ambition.  

My father, the war hero, was a fantastic dancer. Not like Michael Jackson or Gene Kelly, but he had incredible grace.  Watching him with my Mom at family weddings and celebrations, they were like movie stars in their own world... waltzing or samba-ing with harmony and skill.  It was sort of a revelation, seeing my parents this way-- transformed.

The US Open always reminds me of my father who was also a superb tennis player.  In fact, his dancing skills were probably honed because the tennis club where he worked as a boy recruited the young single employees to dance with random single women at their evening entertainments. He had plenty of practice, and experience with women in his pre-military career.  I'm sure that helped win my Mom over.  

'Do you love me, now that I can dance?' asked Dave Clark in one of the first 45's in my little collection.  My first real romantic experience was a slow-dance at a summer-camp mixer. I went to an all-girls Catholic camp that year and they integrated us once per season with a boys' camp from across the lake.  It was well chaperoned and the lights were bright, but the DJ put on 'Surfer Girl' and a tall boy held out his arms to 10-year-old me.  I could feel his heart beating, among other things.  But I realized dancing was sort of a physical metaphor. 

'When you Dance...I can really love' Neil Young sang and reinforced this metaphor.  There's an irony-- besides entertainers like Michael Jackson, rock musicians commonly do not actually dance much. Think Dylan, Tom Petty... Clapton, even Hendrix. They move around and weave a kind of sexual veil with their performance but they don't don't do steps. I've dated a few and offstage they can be a little awkward. 

Over years I've thought long and hard about the Donald O'Connor dream... were the initials significant?  Was this a substitute for my father?  As a young girl my father taught me a few steps; this was surely one of the few 'tender' moments between us. Knowing how to partner-dance was a part of our education. I was also sent to ballet-- to tap and jazz and modern dance because it turned out I loved learning steps and the choreographic role-playing.  Not to mention the music.  But dances-- parties-- this seemed to be a much more prevalent courtship ritual in 60's and 70's culture than it is now.  A slow dance with a new crush was a devastatingly sexy experience. I'm dating myself.  My college boyfriend and I loved dancing; it's what brought us together the very first night.  I miss this.

While I can't remember my father ever watching any of my dance recitals (and he certainly boycotted band gigs, lol)... he was very attentive at those of my son's school basketball tournaments he managed.  Although he doesn't really dance, my son shares a kind of athletic grace with his grandfather.  While I never shared my literal dreams with parents, I imagine my father might have been amused by the Donald O'Connor appearance.  I know how they relished watching those musicals...  and besides the Fred Astaire kind, he loved seeing James Brown, Sammy Davis Junior, and later, Michael Jackson. 

All these years later, I recall that old dream like an actual memory. Maybe it was a reference to my father I couldn't understand at the time. I'm trying, years after his passing, to smooth out the rough patches-- not to dance on his grave but to process the legacy with a little remedial choreography and the softer echo of old dreams.