11 A

Since the weekend I've been carrying dread like an unborn child. Literally... the quasi-physical heaviness of a pregnancy, without the joy, without the future. The relentless bad news, the threats to human freedoms and everyday security. It's overwhelming.

I watched a kind of forum on human empathy-- and identified as one of those people who prioritizes others-- known popularly as a 'people pleaser' which is not really a positive thing.  We do no good either for ourselves or others, yet it's built-in-- layered-- a little like a second heart which doesn't serve or beat, but simply aches.  There is no surgery for this; I suppose a high dosage of meds would temper it, but my friends know overstrict emotional self-parenting makes me reluctant to even use aspirin.  

My Irish nanny told me at the age of four not to tell my parents but I was a natural-born Catholic.  I asked her all kinds of questions about things, and I was perpetually preoccupied with the reviving of dead insects, plants, birds... tearing up in Church at the hymns and prayers, obsessed with but unable to fully fathom the Jesus story.  I watched magicians pull rabbits and living things from boxes... the personal metaphor of my personal hat somehow implies this secret belief that something mystical is hidden there-- that life is not all objective-- music, most of all, maybe. 

So while we cannot all be heroes, we can perhaps be conjurors... we can be fixers or healers.  Watching a concert at the Central Park bandshell Tuesday evening I realized how completely altered I was with each piece-- as though I physically melted into the cosmic architecture... I could almost sense the composer and his vision.  To be a musician is such a blessed thing... how I miss the gigs of old. Even those sweaty crowded dive bars-- to be part of the crowd-shaping thing... it was a blessing. 

And the actual heroes... well, they are passing with acceleration. Rick Derringer... we all disagreed with his politics in the end, but I had ties to him through various people I worked with.  One night he came into one of those east village bars in the days when cabaret laws enforced a three-people-only-rule onstage.  We were  a well-working trio... Rick, to participate, sat on a barstool across from the bandstand, plugged in and played like a phantom genius inhabiting our amplifiers.  I tried to remember that, and to honor his passing.

There are times when politics must take a back seat.  The irony of that plane crash yesterday-- in a second we recognize tragedy... the enormity and horror of a scene like this... the human grief... the families... and yet daily we hear news of missiles and war, and equally devastating destruction-- death and hideous injuries... and we digest this. What is wrong with us?  How have we grown immune to the architecture of suffering on a large scale?  Because it doesn't affect our neighborhood?  

I read and I read.  I watch way too much television.  I have friends who tell me they don't watch news... it's too terrible.  I cannot help feeling this responsibility-- just to know, and yet I cannot help. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading books... they are both comforting and alarming... the past has taught this generation little; we seem to be repeating the same mistakes in different clothing. There is no DNA to identify a situation, but the parallels are disturbing.  The suppression of freedom-- the support of freedom to be racist and uncompassionate... what is our human responsibility? If a nation decides to attack another, it's a hideous barbaric choice. But still there are good people on both sides; and one cannot condone anti-semitism because the actions of Israel are aggressive and inhumane.  No religions teach this kind of thing. 

People like me, my psychiatrist friend tells me, get cancer.  They suffer and cannot exorcize what compels them to live inside this chronic empathic cloud. If it's not one thing, it's another.  I worry.  My son is my absolute source of light.  He, fortunately, has not inherited my emotional impairment.  He is smart and forward-thinking and extremely functional. Hats off to him, truly.

Yesterday I tried a local pharmacy-- sick of the lines and the monopoly of these huge drugstore chains and the whole profitable medical industry. It is right by a local mosque; the owner is Muslim and so kind.  When he walked from behind the counter, I saw he was a huge man, with a terrible disability... unidentifiable. I immediately invented this narrative that he'd been somehow beaten and tortured in a torn country and survived with a twisted architecture.  Painful to see him walk... and yet he was happy and smiling and grateful for my tiny business.  When I got home I realized my prescription was nearly at expiration.  I will not complain. I know this is wrong-- I'll simply wait and get a refill eventually. This is medicine; this is a business... and yet for me it is not.  I have adopted the pharmacist into my massive family of those for whom I worry.  

11A.  I hate flying... the slightest turbulence gives me terrible anxiety.  In 1988 I took Pan Am flight 103 the night before that horrific crash; I felt like a survivor in a way.  But I cannot imagine processing the miracle of walking away from a wreck like yesterday's. One man.  Defying a lethal diagnosis... dodging an executioner's bullets.  It's unfathomable... the burden of being that person, if you're someone like me-- how to process, how to return a massive 'favor'... the one home that survived the fires in a neighborhood destroyed... the one standing tree after a tornado. Nothing compares.  Inexplicable. 

Many of my friends have no religious beliefs.  They take a scientific perspective on death as a full biological stop. How does one explain the rapture of music?  I don't know. The thousands of movies that interpret and explore an afterlife-- angels and heaven and ghostly hauntings.  Like a hunting dog, I have often picked up the scent of previous lives, the déjà-vu.  I wonder if the passenger in 11A sensed these things.. how his life will change.  Already real estate brokers are asking a premium for 11A apartments.  People are booking the seat first... they could charge a premium.  

I'm hoping somehow to unburden myself of this weight.  Not hopeful because the news is cumulative;  problems outweigh solutions. Sicknesses far outnumber cures... and will continue. Death will relentlessly equate births... one cannot exist without the other, really... sort of a paradox.  We can only hope that each of us provides a little relief to someone-- sharing a sandwich, proverbially. It's contagious, kindness... really the only thing we can control-- our personal space, the way we manage it. A different kind of pandemic... maybe it's my ingrained vague version of Catholic belief... and the importance of mercy-- to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc.  And maybe the victims of the plane crash were taken to heaven... but 11A was given a mission.  We are all, those here reading-- given a daily second chance.  Trying to decipher mine, today. 

Promises, Promises

When my Mom was alive, we had this annual personal New Year's Eve ritual. Wherever I was-- wild party, gig (usually), even at college or in El Salvador (once in the 1970's), I'd call her up and she would promise (yes, promise) that this was going to be the 'year of years, that brilliant things were going to happen, blessings fall like magic stars and the fairy-tale would come true.'  Something like this.  I would hang up and feel great about my future.  It was a kind of spiritual medicine.

I'm not sure if it was those childhood experiences in Holy Family Church with my Irish nanny, or the osmotic indoctrination by my Italian Catholic neighbors who warned daily of mortal sins and an eternity in hell, but I took my promises seriously.  Most of my friends, and my son, will testify that if I have promised something, I never fail them.  Not that this has not cost me a great deal of angst and often absurd attachment to things I held together with wires and nails or needles and thread-- safety pins, pie dough.  Cakes baked on a campfire, gifts sewn by hand, trips to nowhere at great expense, and some pain and tough rehabilitation.

Not so the rest of this world.  People like me, people who take words seriously, are in the minority.  The fake news is old news for us; we have been not just disappointed and duped but personally injured by liars.  'Campaign-promise' has acquired the status of crocodile-tears.  It's something you say to get what you want, like all those men in our lives who swore up and down their eternal love.

I promise I will be back, I tell the homeless man who is nagging me for a sandwich again.   All I have is foodstamps and he smashed his hands again, hitting the wall to relieve his bi-polar mania; they are bandaged and the jar of peanut butter and loaf of bread is unmanageable today.  So I walk the 21 blocks home, wrap up a few in plastic, walk back in the stifling evening heat.  No one ever comes back, baby, he says.  Not from the final walk home, I joke...  but this time-- well, I did.  I promised.

My baby boy was born amidst some turmoil in my marriage-- the devastating realization that although my English husband solemnly promised to love me 'to the exclusion of all others', this was not to be the case.  Forget the 'till death do us part'.  No one really expects that these days... but after producing his heir (yes, I'd promised to marry him and have his child) which he'd promised to care for so I could continue my career path-- my gigs and recording contracts-- he was montaging into an alcoholic mess of irresponsibility and drama.  I looked at that baby, the first night home-- me, who'd had to sit in on the 'new fathers' class at the hospital where you diaper a doll-- and I promised him-- whatever it is that is bothering you, whatever is making you cry-- I will figure this out.  I will do it.  At that moment he was on top of a vibrating clothes dryer in the laundry room (a remedy for colic) and he seemed to open his little eyes and relax.

Not that I am a saint by any means; I am a writer and a reader and I respect 'the word'.  I suppose God never promised anything; he spoke, he acted (or failed to act).  Promises are mortal things.  Oaths of office and swear-ins, vows and contracts are human inventions which are necessary in a world that assumes the eventuality of falsehood and failure.  Our president is a walking ball of tangled yarns-- the elephant-lie in every room, the cardboard cartoon character with a skin costume and an unremovable wig.  What is this country if we cannot apprehend its signature villain, trap a crazed animal and keep its prey safe?  No one promised us goodness from the government.  Some of us made these assumptions when we were small.  Our first-grade history teacher read the tale of the first George W. confessing to chopping down a tree; we grew up thinking this was not just presidential but 'precedential'.

From my college graduation, I was forced by my tough father to commit to an old-school major-medical policy.  It covered anything the standard hospitalization didn't... and built in was an annuity to begin at 65, life insurance.  I paid into it every year.  The premiums increased.  I complained.  My agent was a woman named Mildred Kornhauser.  She worked from home-- from her voice, I had an image of a Joyce Carol Oates type.  She convinced me every year-- these policies were obsolete after 1975.  They were air-tight and irrevocable.  The company was The Equitable.  It could have been on the PanAm building.

My friends know how I struggled through the single-parent years.  How we had no vacations, no movies, no dinners (occasional Happy Meal on a holiday), how we walked-- how I worked, how I picked up and dropped off every single day, managed to barter some skills for camps and sports programs... worked nights while he slept, etc.  But I paid my premiums.  For 45 years?  I called Mildred Kornhauser, we negotiated, raised deductibles... but I kept up, knew I'd have a little security as I grew older-- the comfort of extra medical assistance-- private nursing, a better network of physicians for me and my growing boy.  The annuity.

When The Equitable was bought by AXA, Mildred promised no change in anything.  After all, the policy was irrevocable.  But several years ago... I was informed that it was discontinued.  Just like that.  The AXA executives party in the Hamptons and on Donald Trump's golf courses; but me-- my annuity vanished.  Some nights I lay awake and calculate... in the 40-some-odd years I paid in something like $250,000.  Mildred Kornhauser, God rest her soul-- was dead.  She probably earned very little in her lifetime-- I always pictured her wearing an old bathrobe and eating a packaged donut dipped in Maxwell House when we spoke.   My new agent was an electronic prompt.

And oh, yes, there was a class action suit.  I received exactly $572.  Yes.  Annuity?  I will spend my senior years the way I spent single motherhood--- lying awake, thanking God for health, praying, wondering how I will manage to keep my home, wandering from supermarket to supermarket, stretching out my food stamps the way these homeless men cannot seem to do, and I don't blame them.

So when I saw the negotiated Facebook fine of $5 billion... well.. who gets that money? The $2.5 billion remaining after lawyers have taken their share, and closer to $1 billion by the time everything else is deducted... certainly not anyone who was actually hurt or compromised? And the Equifax settlement?  The company that promised security and protection but violated your privacy?  Would Mark Zuckerberg even notice a $5 billion debit in his account? maybe his accountant would.  Maybe Equifax would send him a text-alert.  It reminded me.  Equifax.... Equitable...

For those of us who pay on time, raise our children without support, carry on responsibilities, take out the trash for our handicapped neighbors and feel committed to our life projects, however much this costs in emotional and financial sacrifice... what reward is there?  The universal promise of death lies ahead for us all... And yet there is the soft blanket of the word when someone whispers it in our ear.  Yes, it changes our chemistry, that word-- however it has been beaten and distorted so that its meme might look like a question mark, however it has been infused with killing irony and a unique kind of weapon. I would still give anything to have my Mother's voice come through my phone as I did one July night when the fireworks reminded her of New Year's Eve.  I must call my daughter Amy, she must have thought.   It made sense-- through her dementia and confusion... in the heat, she left a message promising a wonderful year.

Wildfire of the Vanities

The passing of Tom Wolfe is yet one more fallen leaf from the tree of my New York City.  Like Quentin Crisp, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol-- he walked among the ubiquitous social landmarks of the version of our eccentric and rich urban culture I inherited in the 1970's.  He'd occasionally show up at the gallery where I worked; you could find him daily lunching at his favorite table in the Isle of Capri on Third Avenue and 61st Street-- right in the windowed perimeter area as though he was willingly on display, in his signature white suit, impeccably groomed and accessorized.  His hair was perfect.  Like so many writers of the 20th century who lambasted and loved the city, there will be no one to fill the vacuum he leaves.

A year or so ago, I saw him on the street, looking frail and aged maybe beyond his years, and it occurred to me that his generational tide was receding in a sad way; my own peers have grown old, whether they fight this or not.  We prepare ourselves for these clockwork ravages of time-- the natural purges of decades... but unlike the seasonal rhythms of nature-- the human race is not deciduous.  We die off, and the replacements are quite unlike their parent foliage.  If our annual cherry trees lost their color we would notice; not as much with the changing of the cultural guard.

The Bonfire of the Vanities seems innocent now, compared with the widened gap in our economic architecture; the millionaires have ballooned into billionaires, crime is criming, institutional corruption is rampant and pungent-- Wall Street, politics-- the music business-- just about everything is tainted with the stench of greed and the manipulations of power brokers.  Our daily news brings us one falling man after another-- the ones who grab, who touch, who lie, cheat, hoard and dissemble.  We are a diseased culture all dressed up like queens and princesses-- like strippers and whores-- we are enhanced, coiffed, made-up, pumped up like nothing else.

Coming uptown last Monday I was re-routed by the massive security barricades surrounding the Met Gala.  The police presence rivaled the Pope's visit.  Pedestrians and traffic were forced to bypass a wide radius around the temporary palatial-scale tenting surrounding the museum like a Christo installation-- for what?  So that the rain or elements did not alter the finery of the attendees who are not the New York social stars, but the usual nouveau celebrities-- the Kardashians, Beyonce, Rihanna--- on and on...  my museum-- selling itself to Hollywood for money-- so that the crowd-drawers-- the Costume Institute-- the rock and roll culture-- can continue to put on show-stoppers that bring audience but dwarf the art for which the museum was built to house?

I grew up at the cultural knees of this place.  I wandered its vast rooms and explored everything from Greek amphora to Chinese porcelain.  I prayed to the virgins, wept over the Dead Christ images, held my breath at the exquisite painted life of these dedicated artists of the past-- dreamed their dreams,  absorbed their images of history and mythology like my own bloodline.  A library card was all it took to gain access to these halls...  even as a young girl I let my princess fantasies loose when I ascended the Grand staircases.  I often did my homework in the Temple of Dendur and walked my dog at night outside the windows so I could imagine myself alone by the great silent pool.  

I've been experiencing for years the pop-wash of the museums-- the DJ's and soundtracks in the auction houses, the clublike atmosphere they create to pull in the younger crowd-- to make art 'relevant'... but somehow the paparazzi and celebrity-pomp seemed misplaced at the Metropolitan Museum.

Of course, that is the point now.  The celebrity culture owns everything; even the British House of Windsor, come this Saturday.  I used to get my fashion sense through art-- studying the great costumes and creations of the past via these paintings.  Now art is fashion, fashion is art...  the museums take their inspiration from the culture rather than lifting us to some artistic epiphany.  My first Graduate School 'talk' at the museum was the Giovanni Bellini Madonna-- most of these artists worked on Church commissions-- religious subjects and altarpieces; the spiritual informed their work and they innovated as they observed life:  humanized saints and Christ himself-- fleshy angels and suffering martyrs.  So the themed Gala-- with Catholicism nothing more than a fashion statement-- seemed like true trashy irony.

Not that I'm a religious prude-- but for Christ's sake, the pretentious uber-spending on religious grounds was Vatican-esque.  And Katy Perry literally stopping traffic in her angel wings which seemed more Victoria's Secret than Catholic... Rihanna with her Papal helmet and Sara Jessica Parker-- from the side of a bus to a Nativity on her head--- it was a little ridiculous. And yes, offensive, especially in light of the events of the world, the religious suffering, the poverty and devastation elsewhere, where religion maybe has a different meaning.

Downtown the Rockefeller sale reminded that wealth used to go hand in hand with some reverence for culture.  The collection was staggering and amazing.  That 1905 Picasso was haunting and deep.  Who among the Gala attendees will leave behind anything of this stature-- something museum-worthy in the old sense?  I don't know.  Tom Wolfe was in the hospital with an infection.  I wonder if he'd even had an invitation; whatever, I'm sure the display of vanities on 82nd and Fifth Avenue did not escape him.

Among the objects in the upstairs rooms of Christie's were small furnishings and things which seemed personal and precious.  A huge sort of greenhouse was constructed, with birdsong piped via speakers, and real hedgerow foliage around the display, like real gardens.  Scads of young employees waltzed around with their catalogues, eagerly waiting to show and open things-- unable to answer 99% pf the questions because they haven't a clue about the subject matter-- the meaning.  A young Hispanic woman circled the large greenhouse perimeter sweeping stray leaves into one of those old-fashioned movie-theatre dustpans...  this was her job.  Sweep, sweep... around and around.  She wore a black maid's uniform with an apron, and her eyes were red as though she'd been crying.  I imagined this was her second job and she was glad to have it-- and then perhaps regretted having to lap around while all these gapers got a glimpse of the formerly treasured objects maybe lovingly selected by an American royal family.  She was looking down-- engrossed in her task.  Around her neck was a simple cross, which touched me-- so like a young saint she was-- pious and simple, bowed and lost in the crush of the pursuit of something like money, less like art...

RIP Tom Wolfe-- whatever you represented, you will be missed.