Carnival

Besides of course the unprocessable Charlotte murders, the now-weekly incidents of terrorism, the daily cruelties and injustices which stick in my throat like indigestible stale bread of communion, the story that has haunted my dreams for weeks is the flooded zoo in Georgia.  The image of these bewildered animals roaming the muddy roads-- hiding, hunting--  the bloody white tiger which was shot by Georgian authorities because it killed a man… the utter incongruity of lions and bears, walking the streets of a city unaccompanied… looking for a context.

I remember once visiting a zoo in Italy when I was young….the animals weren't protected and respected the way they were here in the Bronx.  People threw food and objects at the bears and laughed at them.  One bear seemed to be genuinely 'simple' or mentally deficient-- obviously these things must happen, among animals-- and like a pathetic clown was making fun of itself, for the audience.  It was intolerable for me, an animal lover…

There is something really sad about a zoo….I mean, these animals are raised in captivity, kept relatively safe-- but like our dogs they are flabby and lazy, and lose their instincts and skills.  They are not quick enough to hunt in the wild, to run, to mate with true passion, to be fierce.  Like our pet turtles and fish in tanks… we buy man-made symbols of their habitat, but their artificial world is a bizarre little replica of nature, and their leashless existence without predators is abnormal.

So facing a sort of natural disaster, with no one to protect them, they were suddenly dumped into a world which is not their world, but a civilized city, also turned chaotic by the flooding-- bewildered, relying on keepers and caretakers for their needs they were helpless and terrified.  Some of them, using the only defense available, were hunted down as protection.  Killed through no fault of their own--- looking for some reminder of their environment-- trees, a place to nest, a rooftop--the hippo swimming in a city square, a baby bear clinging to an air conditioning unit, a hyena on a man's balcony…  And some of them still wandering, starving, wondering… the inventory at a zoo of this nature is difficult… unknown deaths and escapes in this kind of situation when human coffins are floating freely in the streets, from the waters rising.  Who protects us, in a natural disaster?   Noah's ark of course comes to mind, but what of the non-chosen animals, bellowing helplessly as the waters rose?

The other bit of information from this relatively minor crisis was the local assessment of the citywide damage-- which looked extensive and devastating--- at $18 million.  In Manhattan, this does not even cover an average luxury penthouse renovation.  Maybe a very minor Picasso painting.  Context.

It's been a strange year-- train accidents, earthquakes… that same night I learned about the Georgian zoo animals, I listened to one of the Everest climbers who escaped death from the quake-triggered avalanche.  Random occurrences…  people who seem rather calm.  And then there is the pedestrian-- just crossing a street… who gets smashed by an out-of-control SUV, who left her house in the morning with a list, and maybe unmatched underwear and dishes in the sink… and never went back… who was judged not by her accomplishments but by what she left undone.  This terrifies me… all the loose endings, all the unfinished stories.

On Mondays when I come across town after my gig, there is one bus driver only on the route.  I get to know these guys-- their habits, their loneliness-- this is a strange time-- hours of back and forth with a handful of passengers and often an empty bus.  The current one has this sort of OCD thing-- he floors it through the park so he just makes the light on Fifth Ave.  It's a little dangerous, and I can feel his adrenaline pump, his heart rate soar-- it's a little bit of a thrill.  I don't know what he'd do if a cab was pushing the downtown light on Fifth and he had to brake suddenly or crash.  I guess this gets him through the night.  One day he'll be replaced.  One day I might get replaced, or be gored by a lost zoo animal.  WIll he wonder about me?  Doubtful.

We all notice how animals elicit world sympathy the way people often do not.  The Save The Whales and Tigers movements seemed to have been celebrity-embraced for many, many years before the Hunger Project.  Youtube hits for cute animals or hippos helping wounded zebras, empathetic elephants-- are viral.  How many of these viewers and 'likers' actually bring a meal to an older person right in their building who may be hungry or unable to eat from loneliness?

I am someone who misses things and people.  I was born with the kind of hole in my heart that can't be fixed.  Things get stuck in there.  Playing music relieves it occasionally-- and ironically, love does not.  It's kind of a reminder-- like a place where I can feel the sand falling through, the tide going out… some one else's pain waxing and waning.  It may be my tragic flaw.  It infuses everything I do and maybe it is a bit of a guarantee of failure.  I have noticed the more successful of my friends don't feel so much anymore.  My neighbor's new book was touted as brilliant and edgy… it was tough and skillful… but quite honestly it left me cold--- like house music.  It lacked humanity.  It was affectedly eccentric and plodding-- like still frames of a wave coming in… no fluidity or life.  I didn't care.  He didn't care.  It was like a book-show.  But it drew rave reviews.

Even my stepmother who suicided last summer-- she was tough.  She was an artist.  Still, I think in the end she feared her own heart.  It was flooded, like mine often is--- when I see two people tearfully parting at a train station, or my friend kissing her husband goodbye in his coffin last month-- these things wreck me and displace me and some nights I can't find my way home.  I miss everyone I ever loved and every bus driver and every wave I witnessed or did not witness on every shore of every country.  I miss my old dogs who have passed on and I find it unbearable that the ones on the street now won't be here in a few years.  I turn to my music and I think about BB, and Johnny, and John Lee-- not one of them seemed less than tough, but they were all singing about letting go and what was gone, long before they got old.

Everyone passes through here--- like an infantry of pathetic soldiers who have no control over their destiny, except they will not return, they will not.  Gravestones, monuments, old scrapbooks… they remind... but the proverbial buck stops there.

I asked my son to reserve a bench in the park for me.. .so when I am gone, someone will maybe bring a book and read next to my name.  Of course he won't do this, because he was born with a strong heart and knows that any bench-sitters will have an iPhone, or a can of beer and some fast food, or they will need a place to lie down and pass the night covered in trash bags and old newspaper.  Raccoons will bring their garbage and pigeons will shit on it.  For him the escaped animals in Georgia (he seemed to think it was the American south) were like a Carnival.  Carnivals feel sad to me-- the people, the animals-- like the depression version of theatre and drama-- a sense of old cigarette smoke and sweaty T-shirts.  Cheap food and paper money.  The scent of failure hanging in the air with the popcorn and cotton candy.

My son is good at throwing things away-- at moving apartments, at not venturing too deeply into dangerous flood waters.  At winning. He can knock over things with a baseball and win an armful of stuffed animals and then leave them on a bench.  Maybe my bench.

Macy Blue

One night last year after an unusually well attended show, I was approached by one of the It-girl clothing designers… I would never have known, but she left me her card, and I looked her up.  ‘Come see me,’ she said, with a convincing handsqueeze. ‘I want to dress you.  You must come.’   So on a Thursday afternoon I wandered by the shop which was cavernous and under-decorated and very sparsely ‘spersed’ with grey wool jumpers (it was fall), garments with perfectly executed asymmetric cuts, minimal vegan-dyed tops, jackets and coats that draped mannequins with grace and unique style.  A modelish girl asked if I wanted help… then the designer herself--- the one who had kneeled at my feet in a dark club—gave me this quizzical look as though I was not only not ‘customer-esque’ but interfering with the ‘flow’ of the space… so I left. 

That was the closest I came to ‘shopping’ since I’d taken the single-parent oath of self-abnegation so many years ago, when I was young enough to pull off the grungy thrift-shop thing.  Outside on West 14^th Street I had a skin-pricking moment as though I’d just been mugged.

So last week I did some enormously simple charitable favor for a woman who turned out to be gracious and rich and insisted on buying me some token of gratitude.  Balenciaga?  Coach? And when I startled, she said…Well, YOU pick it out, … I’d never get you…. And she gave me an ultimatum and a deadline… and began calling every day to remind and inquire…until…with that blues line going over and over in my head (I’ve got a mind to give up living… but I think I’ll go shopping instead)…the Peter Green version--- I went down to 34^th Street--- maybe because one of my UES neighbors had just informed me that the absolute worst people in New York are in Herald Square.  I had to see.  And there was Macy’s.  My Grandmother worked there- during World War II-- the beautiful one who died so young… and  I thought I might invoke her ghost to find me a leather bag (It’s not in my personal ‘culture’ to actually try clothing on).

Downstairs where the clearance items were strewn around and the bags weren’t padlocked to the display, there was a motley crowd… Brazilian tourists piling things into a huge bag… cute bulgy Spanish girls buying things in pink, fat women from Queens holding bags up to the mirror with their heads tilted… a black winking transvestite whose opinion was to become crucial for me in the end…sales girls of all shapes and varieties… and even a coatcheck where the attendant discouraged me from leaving mine… behind which a man in an intern’s green shirt and no pants was lurking.  I though I was hallucinating. 

I could still distinguish leather from whatever… the smell, the vibe…  and I managed, with the transvestite’s head shakes and nods, to acquire something he approved of.    I completed  the transaction feeling like Rip Van Winkle making his first payphone call.On the way back, I became sort of ‘high’ and chatty to my fellow N train passengers and realized I was acting like some kind of psychotic housewife—like I was trying to ‘feel’ normal.   Back home I felt kind of Christmassy—and when my son came home he saw it and started laughing--- well, I said, I can put my laptop in it, and my books, and my gym clothes… It is kind of huge…  

Twice now I’ve tried to put things in it and leave the house-- -and I can’t quite pull it off.  Maybe I’m just warped and so used to this deprivation thing…but I feel sort of ridiculous.  And it’s not pretentious-- -after all it was Macy’s and it was on sale and it’s just a piece of an old cow that died of natural causes, and now it has a home and doesn’t have to be poked and critiqued by fake interns with no pants and other perverts and shopaholics.   But I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m nearly compulsively drawn to return the thing--- Still, I’m toughing it out.   I’m keeping it.  It’s burning a hole in my closet.  Everything feels absurd. 

Most of all, I keep thinking about my kids--- my son is difficult and moody these days.  He is working and being a man and succeeding and ambitious--- but something is not there---something essential—something that loves even Herald Square.  Sometimes I store up all of this stuff—like I need to tell him about my heart, and about how I feel… that life is going by so quickly--- and about 34^th Street and seeing the fake snow and the Macy’s reindeer in the 1950’s and how he himself sat on Santa’s lap and didn’t really want anything in his 3 year old head and he was ‘trusting Santa to bring him a toy’…but we end up just shrugging at each other. 

My niece is struggling too.  Sometimes I want to tell her about a moment—when I was maybe 23 and high in a room with cool guitar players and someone was playing Pink Floyd or maybe even David Gilmour himself with that beautiful mouth was actually there in the room…playing for you… and everyone was in love but you just wanted to sit with your eyes half closed and your cigarette falling out of your hand and the smoke thick and sweet everywhere and the music perfect and your clothes are maybe on or maybe off and there was no future or past but only the perfect weightless present of all-possibility and your mind is perfect and the sex was perfect and you are just where you should always be…

But it’s Sunday and I will go for the few groceries I can afford, because I am, after all, a pumpkin and the leather bag unlike the glass slipper doesn’t fit, and even if I wore it to the designer’s store, she would still not associate this badly dressed woman with the music and the night and the margaritas and the way she needed to tell me something...the way she whispered…

Maybe I’ll just give the bag to my niece and she’ll politely take it and then leave it on a train where some homeless person will find it and use it to shoplift meat from the supermarket whistling the BB King song perfectly and they’ll look the cashier right in the eye as they hand over 82 cents for a can of cherry coke and leave with $170 of ribeye in the expensive leather satchel still whistling.