Scarecrow

When I lived in Mexico, I envied the people their special relationship with Santa Muerte.  I could never warm up to a holiday where there was grave-dancing and celebration.  Death was fearsome for me;  Edgar Allen Poe and Edward Gorey gave me nightmares.  I had no living grandparents (well, none we were allowed to acknowledge) and little intimacy with the elderly.  There was a white bridal gown in a box in our old attic that my sister insisted was used by the spirit of our deceased Grandma on the occasions she visited.  I shivered.  

The first actual death in my young life was my best friend's mother.  She died during the summer-- of cancer.  I could not imagine losing my own Mom-- the thought absolutely terrified me, although I often wished my father would disappear and leave her eligible to couple with some random prince or even a kind carpenter or fisherman.  My friend's Mom had these downturned eyes and permanently worried brows.  I felt safe in her home-- sleeping over, on little trips; she was the leader of our Brownie troop and she was kind and soft-spoken.  I was devastated by the news of her death; her daughter had to leave the summer program where they'd put us to distract from the fallout of her advanced illness.  I had to stay behind where I wept and tried to process the concept of 'gone-ness' in my 8-year old world.  I offered to lend my own mother-- to trade places.

Not long afterward the widowed husband remarried a woman with three children.  The new mixed family was buoyant and festive.  He seemed to blossom with a new wife... and that was that.  But I carried my friend's mother's memory like a badge-- like a missing tooth when I smiled.  No one seems to notice, and it's inappropriate to be weeping daily like a drama princess when the immediate family has made great effort to recover.  It put a wedge between me and my best friend; I missed her Mom when I slept over-- the milk and cookies, the way she braided my hair so it wouldn't pull... her soft sing-y voice calling Good night, girls! when we were up past midnight whispering and giggling.

I'm not the poster child for Life Goes On.  The losses and griefs take their toll.  Besides Jesus, there is a litany of saints and angels in my nightly recitations-- all of whom are conspicuously missing from my life.  The past year or two has had its own version of pain; the fact that the world seems to be grieving does not comfort much.  I remember my aging Mom complaining there were so few left of her acquaintance-world-- crossing out in red the date-book names that no longer required birthday cards.  Her Christmas list was down to single digits.  

October has always been a sad month for many reasons... I also dread the ambivalent celebration of Halloween.  I've never been a costume-enthusiast... and while I appreciate the parade, the souls of the departed give me no incentive to party.  Thirty-two years ago I went into false labor on October 31st and prayed I would not be giving orange and black birthday parties for years to come.  As it happened, my son waited a full week, for which I am grateful.  Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater my mother used to recite as we carved teeth on our Jack-o-Lanterns; she was a late October baby.  

A week ago I walked back from Harlem along the East River... for a while I was shadowed by a man who pulled out a knife and asked me for money.  As it was, I had none-- food stamps, which I offered... he blinked his red-rimmed eyes and decided not to hurt me.  Was there a guardian angel behind us? It occurred to me that I was not even frightened. A few blocks later,  the sun set and produced a vivid double rainbow which truly merited the 'arc-en-ciel' nomenclature... I can't recall ever seeing anything that compared in New York City.  The Hunter's Moon this week-- has had an exceptional performance-- a soloist among choruses of clouds.  

Late last night-- almost dawn... I took out my guitar, as is my habit... and the lights in my living room began to blink.  That would be Alan, I said out loud.  Spirits.  Ghosts... I am approaching a point where absent friends will soon exceed the ones who are here.  The pandemic has whittled down my circle of intimates to a very few.  It is a kind of limbo... I feel more connected to those who have passed.  We speak, we exchange.  I sing to them.  My own daughter walks among them.  

I haven't visited my mother's grave for nearly three years; she'd have turned 97 this week... this seems uncanny.  I celebrate her pumpkin-carving hands when they were still manicured and elegant-- me, in my uncostumed non-finery, like an old scarecrow with arms extended,  ghosts and spirits perching.  

All the rest have 31.....

The cusp of August is the cruelest of all... after all those days of long, lingering heat and humidity-- of pink sunsets and procrastinations... September is staring me in the face like a damned balance sheet.  It's been a year now that my Mom is gone;  I stood over her grave last week-- listened for her shadow... praying that old family feuds would allow my stonecutter's dream to mark her peace... I sang her little song ... If ever I would leave you...it wouldn't be in summer... but it was.

The year I was born saw the hottest streak of the century.  We toughed it out in those pre-air-conditioned days at the beach at Belle Harbor, or the city river boardwalks... I swear I remember the heat of my stuffed crib-reindeer, his wilted felt lashes fluttering in the fan-wind, the buzz of flies and mosquitoes outside the apartment screens whining to come in and sample the sweet room-babies... Perry Como on the radio...  It set a bar for high temperatures; I've never really minded the heat since then-- well, maybe one year, with a cast on my leg, I struggled through, sitting under the apple tree, distracted by my new discovery of language and books; my mother made frozen lemonade and taught me to sing Que sera, sera...

In 1969 I spent the month in Mexico where it seemed a daily rainstorm relieved baking afternoons, and neighborhood boys brought guitars and played 'Yo sin ti'  over and over.  We hitchhiked to the city where I locked myself in a record-store booth with 'Tommy' and realized how homesick I was for rock and roll.  See Me... Feel Me... it was like a shiver.

Another summer I danced at a festival-- eight grueling hours of practice and technique in hot studios and gymnasiums..  I'd lean on the sill of my tiny Connecticut room at 2 AM and hear the same loon moaning.  Weekends I rode bone-tired on the back of a vintage BMW motorcycle between New London and the city, clinging to the hot leather back of a budding rock-God, hearing the young Van Morrison in my head and watching the road for a Dairy Queen.

A few years later, I had the first taste of The Dark Side of the Moon sitting outside a hunting lodge in the hills of Northern Italy with a bunch of British hippies and piles of drugs... thinking through a fog of smoke and Valpolicella how the word august meant celebrated and auspicious from the Latin... we were high and dry and often naked and the world spread beneath us like a vineyard... the days baked on, Money was a song... it seemed the summer never ended until one day we woke up happily back in our dormitory.

Lately the summer funerals have draped the dog days with mourning.  On 103rd Street there is a new shrine to another young neighborhood casualty.  Papi, the messages spell out in tears.. rows and rows of candle-glasses and stuffed animals for Di-Quai who was just 19.  This, too, shall pass.  Already in the 104th-Street playground there is a barbecue with yellow balloons.  Someone has brought a light... the boombox blasts No Tears Left to Cry and then Diamonds by the Boatload... they are done with Aretha-- that was last week's old-school.   And Saturday's perfect cupcake-top moon... the iced vanilla round,  pearl of my heart...   is now a lemon slice in the sky to these sun-baked eyes tonight.

No matter how rough it gets, we gonna go 31 this month.  It seems unfair that they are unequal, that September 'hath' 30,  and February we all pay for an extra two days of cable we don't get.  But August... it held out its hot breath until Aretha, John McCain, Di Quai and a host of others realized they would not see the changing of the leaves.  Where do they go, I wonder... sitting by my mother's burial site with my ear to the ground, feeling the afternoon warmth in the grass, trying to fight the terrible urge to dig through the soft earth and see what is left of her-- just once more... like an Edgar Allen Poe poem.  Forgive me, Mom.  For not cremating you, for failing, for your missing epitaph.

On the way back down Madison tonight, I passed that big black hospital; outside, a few men in wheelchairs were taking in the night air, smoking forbidden cigarettes and comparing bandaged legs in various phases of amputation, whistling at the young nurses.  Where are their mothers, wives, children?  I wonder if they miss the old summer songs the way I do.  They don't seem nearly as miserable as some of my neighbors here in the building-- with their renovations and their botox and their summer hair treatments.  My Van Morrison is old and heavy,  Elvis is long gone.... my lovely Mom who mourned Perry Como and Frank Sinatra with true grief barely had a voice when she lay down for the last time.  I wonder who she dreamed of, who she took with her that last trip... I hope Di Quai had time to make a wish.  Happy Birthday, Papi... whenever it will be... 31 candles I've blown out now... I don't know what song you'd like to hear, but I'm sure someone does... For now I'll just whistle like an old train and greet the September morning with courage.

Grave Thoughts

Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me…over and over in my head the last week,  the over-used Emily Dickinson couplet like an annoying nag, a childhood haunting-- because I never loved that poem… and the image of the threesome in the carriage… Death, the deceased, and immortality-- well, three's a crowd and they seem somehow incompatible.  Death is neither kind nor proud, as John Donne pointed out over three centuries ago… and how many generations of Donnes have stopped for Death-- have thought about these things, have struggled with acceptance or resistance, embraced God in strength or desperation?

Despite the fact that the only absolute certainty of life is its demise, we are universally unprepared when death touches us-- when we are diagnosed or when we lose a loved one.  Some of us obsess and read obituaries daily, commemorate daily passings on our Facebook pages, indulge in private rituals and personal prayers.  Are we thinking of the departed or of our own selves, trying to rehearse the moment, to cope, somehow, with the ultimate thing we dread?  Some cultures celebrate death; my own foray into Goth-dom explored the macabre and dark; it was appealing and brave-- confronting the monster head-on, wearing fear on our clothing, tattooing its image on our skin like a boldfaced dare.

It's ironic that my last post was a sort of Eulogy… just days later my beloved mother died and the farewell was neither noble nor poetic.  I have had altogether too much intimacy with Death this year-- family, mentors…  my friend with whom I sat, whose witness and unwilling end-of-life nurse I became because she was unable to accept her fate and fought until the very end.  It was something I wish I'd not experienced, although I am told I did a humane and sympathetic thing.  There was no closure; the end was hideous, painful, sad and desperate.  The posthumous silence was heavy and haunted; it all felt terribly wrong and as though I'd been let into a private room no human should see.

My Mom-- the version I knew-- had been fading into some emotional and physical place of distance.  I could seldom reach her, although she occasionally came back into the present and looked at me with such deep poignant recognition and love; I craved those brief moments, and was not ready to lose her.  Personal grief is like a wave-- like a tidal undertow that knocks you off your feet and takes your breath away.  It is the end of possibility, the absolute curtain on something that feels like your true love.  It is undeniable and difficult.

Burial feels like a primitive ritual.  For me the concept of burial associates with hiding something-- covering something up which will eventually be uncovered.  Maybe that was the point of the ritual; I haven't researched this… but have read plenty of Edgar Allen Poe, and have noticed the enormous popularity of zombie and vampire films in recent years.  Still, as far as I know, no one has actually yet come back and described the experience.  Seeing my mother's coffin in a hole in a graveyard surrounded by strangers made me feel a little more desperate.  Leaving her there felt wrong; I sensed in my broken heart a calling-- don't go… stay with me, I wanted to scream-- to tear my hair and rub dirt on my face, to lie on top of her and sing to her… but I had to behave, to place my small shovel of dirt with a single white rose and wait for the gravediggers to follow later on with their little dedicated steamshovels.

The gravestone is a symbol, for most of us… but we still visit-- we leave flowers and stones; my friend brings his trucker Dad a coffee light and sweet with a glazed doughnut.  I've even seen a pack of cigarettes in a cemetery… a ball and glove, a Yankee hat.  Does this help?  It is so literal.  Death is literal; the afterlife is vague and unexplained.  We speak to the dead, we pray, we cry-- we write songs and poetry… we find things on the street, we look for signs.  Who knows?   Que sera, sera, my mother used to sing to me, but she didn't really believe that.  She even told me she wanted to be cremated because she feared suffocating.  Her wishes were not honored by my sister who always seems to manage the last word in my little family.  My brand of sympathy is discredited, my rock and roll existence is like a stain on the stiff white-washed facade of her artifice.  She has invented her version of dignity, of shame-hiding and cover-up.  Yes, burials of all types are familiar to her.  She speaks in cemetery tongues.

My Mom's interment took place on the day of the solar eclipse.  This offered some comfort for me, in the cosmic confluence of the heavens and the transition of my Mom who despite her old-fashioned ideas and obsolete code of ethics was rather pure of heart.  It forced us to look upward, to the sky-- a sort of directive to symmetry, and to the place she, in her funny naiveté, along with so many of us, imagined.   She also loved me, truly and deeply, while often objecting to my lifestyle and regretting what to her seemed my shameful and unnecessary oath of poverty and allegiance to a difficult and vague life-plan including single motherhood.   But I never complained, and everyone else did.

As things so often come in threes, I feel almost released this season, although I realize the acceleration of life at my age will bring the next round altogether too soon.  The Houston floods have brought the specter of mass grief and loss into everyone's horizon, and this tempers our selfish personal sorrows,  or inspires in us that much more sympathy.   For me the musician--  timing is everything.  My sleepless nights now are spent watching endless footage of rising waters like tears-- of rescue and sacrifice and devastation.  We are so reminded of our helplessness in the larger 'picture' of the world; for those who have laid loved ones to 'rest' in graveyards and cemeteries… the ravages of nature have as little regard for the dead as the living.  It is tragic and will leave an enormous scar.  And yet, one day, the sun will come out, as it did here all week while the southern coast was pounded, and the universe does not feel shame or grieve for its acts of cruelty. We sad humans must mourn, and save, and help, and love, and try to come to some understanding with Death, because he is surely not kind and will not pass us by, not a single one-- not so far.

Bewitched

All Hallow's Eve-eve back in the early 1960's was always known as Mischief Night.  While you slept, your house or parents' car might be egged, tagged, covered with toilet paper and goop, smashed pumpkin meat or worse.  You hoped for the best.  When we were teenagers, we went out and witnessed the terror, sometimes participated in a little naughtiness-- no serious damage but some spray paint and mess.  There was a woman on the block behind us who was reputed to be a witch.  She came home at 7 AM after God-knows-what with a black kerchief tied around her head, and her shades were drawn all day while presumably she slept along with the vampires and goblins of our neighborhood.  A broom was frequently leaning against the front door-- most likely for sweeping her stoop, but allegedly among us kids this was her night transportation.  I looked inside her mailbox many times-- mostly the same catalogues we all got in those days; her name was Eunice B. Harrison.  We addressed her this way when we made prank phone calls during the day… we spied on her and left dead bugs and cut fingernails and animal fur in shoeboxes on her windowsill.

Years later my Mom told me Mrs. Harrison was a nurse and she worked nights.  That's what you think, I told her.  I'd never seen her face-- didn't know if she was black or white… but she was our only local flesh-and-blood designated ghoul and we nourished her mythology with tales and conjecture.  Ironically, a few short years later we'd all be obsessing over Edgar Allen Poe, dying our hair and dressing up to hang out at Rocky Horror showings.  So much for the withered legend of Eunice B.

I sometimes wonder whether my neighbors' daughters perceive me as a kind of witch.  I dress in black, leave my apartment late at night wearing a hat and carrying a strange looking case; often returning at dawn, my blinds drawn against the sun so I can get some daytime sleep. Then again, they  have a multitude of horror apps at their fingertips, all-Vampire TV, the Twilight series in HD 24/7, etc.  We had to invent our own entertainment in those days; the Wizard of Oz was shown once a year and it was an event.  In New York City, every night is Mischief Night… and in most neighborhoods, watchful parents accompany their kids while they trick-or-treat; we were on our own.  Fear was personal.

Anyone who has kept watch over a sick child or relative knows that night-workers have a different mindset.  I spent a week in an intensive care ward when my son was six and had a dangerous pneumonia.  His roommate was a young woman who had lived her whole life on a respirator; she was virtually non-responsive, but her Mom chose to keep her alive this way.  Days were peaceful; the shift nurses chatted and ate sandwiches, watched TV and socialized with staff.  But the overnight nurse sat quietly in semi-dark.  She read to the girl-- sang to her at times.  There were 2 emergencies that week-- panicky alarming episodes which required huge x-ray machines to be moved in and used.  These both happened at night, when patients who are not sleeping are maybe anxious and frightened… when death feels a little nearer and the human mind is that much more vulnerable.

Coming home late nights on the subway, I am surrounded by day-sleepers, by this culture of people who are all a little pale, a little subdued, who are used to walking the streets with black shadows, who brush shoulders with the hunted and haunted who either do not or cannot sleep during these hours-- who plot and plan, create, think, suffer, drink, take drugs… stalk, worry, grieve, search and avoid.   We understand one another, we feel a certain kinship.  Most of us are on our way home; there are few destinations at these hours-- there is a sense of denouement, we are without rush, we rely on the unreliable timetables of night trains which travel with delays and issues; very few of us protest and fret. We are tired and insulated, surrounded by our own thoughts and fears-- some of us have had a nightcap or two and know that little will be resolved before tomorrow.  There is a small sense of relief.  We often share jokes and smiles.  There is entertainment and there are beggars, but most of these have given up by 4 AM.  We eat, we dream, we nap a little.  I read and think; we grumble less at the frequent disruptions and detours.  We feel relatively safe in this state of transition.  We are going home.

When I was a sophomore in college I had some small health issue that required a few days in the hospital while they analyzed some organ or other.  It was nothing serious, and I was so young I had to stay in the pediatric ward.  They treated me like a princess.  One night I woke up to find a really handsome young resident sitting by my bed reading volume 2 of Remembrance of Things Past which I had to finish for European Lit.  I pretended to be asleep-- was so surprised and charmed by this; and can remember so well the passage he read:  about love and instability and the fact that happiness neutralizes the suffering necessary to sustaining the instability which is at the core of passion-- something like this, in the Proustian universe.  I remember these pastel-colored paperback books which I loved and cherished and carried for a year, and still, despite the fact I have 4 versions of this novel-- I keep these, to remind me of where I have been and whom I have touched while I read, and how this world-view changed my life and taught me to dissect and observe and feel these tiny moments.

I think this doctor had a kind of crush on me; I was lovely then and so young I couldn't reciprocate any kind of mature emotion.  But I remember well feeling so embraced by the night-- even in a hospital-- this sense of being watched and understood and cared for… the opposite of fear.

Tonight I had to take my friend to an emergency room.  Medicine for her is state-provided and uncaring  and callous.  She is in the excruciating indescribable pain of late-stage cancer and the hopelessness of her case only seems to provoke hostility in staff because they are reminded of their ineffectuality.
She begged me to take her back home; anywhere but there, at night.  There are no handsome interns to watch over her and read her Proust.  There is no one.  I am helpless and annoying because anyone who is suffering less reminds her that she is quite alone.  She wants to die and yet I feel she holds some tiny thread of hope that this is all a nightmare, and she will wake up calm and pain-free.  I realize tonight that she, like all those about to die, must first bury their own dreams and that is tough.  I walked home across town in this pre-Halloween unsettled weather and thought about the souls which supposedly fly around freely for this one night.  They outnumber the living by myriads-- they and their memories, and their parents and children and lovers… and for my friend-- her dreams of being a great actress have dissipated into medicated dreams of swimming and floating and nightmarish twinges.

I am sure this October 31 that my Eunice B. Harrison is among these souls and rather than spending her nights making wicked mischief on a broomstick, she sat by the bedsides of tired patients and gave her life for their comfort and solace, and never defended her honor to a bunch of clueless, mean teenagers.   So in my modern Gothic lexicon, she is the ultimate Halloween saint; I salute her and wear her black cape of goodness as my costume and only pray she will in some version watch over my friend and weave a spell of sleep and carry her through to some better moment.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

Did you ever notice how cities each have their own distinct smell?  I mean, you could air-drop me blindfolded into a random street… and I might not be able to ID it straight off, but I could at least tell you where I am not.  

We are all so totally sick of the arctic freeze, but the silver lining for me is this cold starry smell of New York winter nights, especially when there is no wind and no humidity-- like a clean black dog under UV light.  Although I am definitely missing the distinct molecules of Philip Seymour Hoffman's exhaled brilliance.  The city air will never be the same--no matter how many babies shriek their first sweet breath into the black sky, no matter how many genius cold brass tenor solos there are for us to inhale…

Smart people need to have a reason for everything… an analysis-- like black being the absence of light, or someone dies because their girlfriend told them she would never, ever again lie down in their bed… and black for them is the absence of her.  So many of us stay (or stray) because we are afraid of the dark--because the night, as opposed to a sunny day--- can feel endless and terrifying.   So many people use because they need to understand the dark-- -to befriend it-- and when you go just one step too far, and lie down with it--- you may have crossed over.

At night things poke me like needles.  Thoughts.  Obsessions.  Desire.  People steal more in the dark.  Years back, someone broke into my flat and took everything.  My underwear.  My sewing machine.  Vitamins.  They left books.  I was obsessed with deciphering the mystery of it.  I had just had a brief affair with a published but reputedly bi-polar writer. I met him at the Figaro one night and took him home-- just like that, the way things happened in those days.  The way you knew when you went in for a coffee that you were going to have an adventure.  It went on for a bit, but I met a musician the next week.  The writer was getting out of control and I dumped him.  It had to be him--a crime of passion, revenge… maybe he would return and slit my throat, cut off a lock of hair.  At night the phone would ring---and ring… I refused to answer.   It felt so Edgar Allen Poe.

I finally realized: Having someone steal from you is sort of a gift.  You learn to live without it-- they didn't get your soul, and you probably should have given it to them, anyway, without a fight-- -without regret--- because so much of possession is tinted with greed and that taints the object, takes away its grace.

Here is a little Winter Tale:  Years back, maybe just after 9/11 when New York was in a sort of massive depression… one of my old friends from the Palladium days called me.  She had an eviction notice--- was strung out, sick.
I went over, loaned her $50.  She got high.  She looked like hell.  The place stank of vomit and old whiskey and breath.  So she had this great chalk drawing on black paper that Keith Haring had done for her, back in the day.  Sell it, she said.  It was worth at least $20,000, even in the dumpster market of post-9/11.  He had signed it to her--- he never signed things like that.  It was great--- with naked people jumping all over and space ships, and stars, in a black sky. You could smell the wild chill--  the Bacchanalian thing.
Give me a few days, I said… I'll raise some cash for you.  But I failed.  I was always a few bucks short of rent and playing in the subway was non-lucrative and I had a child to feed.  So I brought over this hipster wannabe collector who had this fixation with the 1980's because he had sort of missed it somehow.  He saw the Keith and said to her--- my formerly beautiful friend with the pale lips and stringy hair in her unwashed camisole-dress… I'll give you $3,000.  Not a penny more.  No, no, NO!!! I screamed with my eyes… and tried to pull her into the untidy bathroom… but he was counting out the money and she was sweating… and he rolled it up and off it went, like a swaddled baby being torn from its poor desperate mother.  The greedy bastard.  He actually thought I'd go out with him--- like I'd be impressed with his MO.  I told him the Haring had already decreased in value by 80% because it belonged to him and hung up.

My friend suicided 6 years ago, from a window on the LES.  Last week I saw the picture had sold at a London auction for $172,000 as 'the property of a Swiss collector'.  The bastard.  First he loaned it to some high-profile show so it had a pedigree and it was white-washed the way these sleazy rich dealers do it these days.  But I know how he stole it… and I know how she processed it and just let it go, the way Keith in his pure days just let things go...and I think of her in these black starry freezing nights shivering in her nightdress with the yellow crust on her mouth-- one of my unwashed angels. Or maybe she is up there in the freezing star-smell getting high with Jim Carroll and Philip Seymour Hoffman, teaching him how not to be afraid of the dark-- teaching me to not just lie down with the night but to let things go, to give people the chance to steal, if that is what it takes… like a winking angel.