#Chasing-the-Dollar

I had kind of a shitty day today.  Maybe it's just the September back-to-school seasonal dread... it persists well into adulthood where you are forced to acknowledge that mixed in with the old fall apprehension was a sprinkling of anticipation-- new people, new challenges, new teachers, new tasks.  Hope, I think it was called...  a little excitement-- an opportunity to use your new pens and notebooks-- a clean slate-- resolutions... and somehow always some new boy in your class you'd never noticed who gives you extra motivation to wear your new fall wardrobe.

At this point in my life, I've given up Halloween.  The natural indignities of aging are a sufficiently terrifying disguise; if I don't have a gig I quietly avoid my apartment-- leave the candy bowl by the door.  While I do enjoy seeing children in costumes wandering the streets,  I don't really need to supply my rich neighbors' kids with goods they're forced to discard or donate.  Let the homeless eat cake and sweets: God's Love We Trick-or-Treat.

I divide my girlfriends into two groups these days: the go-getters who travel and eat out and socialize and jump around at the gym... and the ones who isolate and sit home passively waiting for old age to seep in like slow-rising floodwater.  The former group-- they go to meet-ups and class reunions because they have never been thinner, or richer, or more (or less) single; they wear make-up to the grocery store and subscribe to dating sites.  The latter have stopped trying to look seductive; many of them were formerly beautiful and have nothing to prove.  They had some richness in their life (or not) and no longer want to advertise.  Both groups have used or use drugs-- recreational or prescription-- Group 2 with limited benefits.

One thing they have in common with my male friends seems to be Facebook.  Group 1 posts meals and travel-logs and happy group-shots of family and friends celebrating.  They use emojis and abuse exclamation points. The latter group members comment and 'like' passively;  they look forward all week to Throwback Thursdays,  spend way too much time on the Manhattan-Before-1990's page, and observe all new deaths with personal mourning posts.  For the Goth sympathizers, the Plath-ites and Genet-lovers, grief is a comfort zone.  We are in our shadow-years... and yet all of us are shocked by deaths among our peers.  There is an epidemic of disease-chronicles, treatment logs and Go-Fund-Mes because baby boomers often failed to heed the ubiquitous and ancient warning that youth is not forever.  Many abused their bodies and failed to squirrel away money for a rainy sick day.  So they post... they confess... they cry publicly... and we look and sympathize and occasionally help.

Both groups are political pundits and animal aficionados, chronic chronologists and nostalgia nurds.  Within categories they find sympathizers and like-minds; they join pages and compare breeds, refer and recommend books, art and music. And they lie.  The first group maybe more than the second-- they lie to themselves and they lie to us.  They photoshop and post old pictures as new; they 'like' things they don't like, out of reciprocal courtesy.  Some of them post happy pictures of themselves with children who have not spoken to them in years.  They pass away-- some from sudden accidents or medical anomalies, some from chronic disease they did not disclose, some from the illness described in great detail in posts-- and some-- just suddenly-- suicide, hours after a non-loaded comment or observation, a wonderful meal-- an event.  Their friends are horrified-- that is, their Facebook friends.  Their real friends-- well, where were they?  Watching their page as though it was life, failing to read between lines (i.e., posts)...  and how much time is left, after our social media binges... to listen to friends, to reach out?

Part of what disturbed me today is the fact that despite all the public presence we have, there is a huge lack of truth-telling and genuine, soul-to-soul communication.  I was horrified by a friend's failure to disclose things which are very pertinent and shocking, in a way.  And I was provoked into providing an opinion by a couple who visited me-- throwing out queries and remarks, and expecting facebook-style comments rather than a conclusive, solid discussion.  I let them have it, my dose of reality... and I suspect I will not see them again soon.  Do I feel badly?  I do.

One trend that bothers me is the exchange of money on facebook-- the Go-Fund-Mes, the campaigns and gifts-- the charity birthday apps which are admirable... but how many of us pledge before a cyber audience, to emoji  accolades, and fail to 'see' our unfortunate neighbors and homeless who lack the organization to even ask... or who ask and ask and are chained to the poverty treadmill of hopelessness?

Today on the way to my afternoon job, a dollar bill literally floated by my head in a small wind, like a cartoon. I ran after it; like a playful child or a bird, it would land and then take-off again, flapping and cartwheeling in the cool air current.  I persisted, to the entertainment of pedestrians until I captured it under my shoe.  I waved it in the air... no takers... well, I guess I'd earned it.  Not my dollar, I wanted to announce... Not my president-- 'Not the planet I signed up for', my bandmate says at least five times daily.  But I pocketed it anyway, knowing-- not unlike the moments and events on our timeline, it would be spent and re-spent... given away or received... valued and appreciated or misused and wasted... but would not remain for long.    

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.

Villa Knell

When I was a girl in a New England summer theatre program I remember singing some song about 'The Knell'… it was a pre-Goth original indie musical someone had written for kids… I had no idea what this meant but it sounded ominous and dark.  Last night, lying in bed in the first summer-preview open-window sleep, this was playing in my head, like a lost Pink Floyd track.

At the end of my Latin Hip-hop dance class, we lie on mats and do some kind of core training and stretching.  For most of my life I've done some kind of dance-- in a studio, in a gymnasium-- often ending up on the floor, staring up at an ultra-high ceiling with fans and fluorescent lights.  It's a kind of continuity, a kind of comfort.  I remember missing my Mom at summer dance training, looking up, as a 9-year-old.  I remember crushing on some drummer as a teenager, stretched out on hard mats sensing my limbs and some kind of desire.  I remember weeping over a missing boyfriend as a young woman, hearing cool-down music, looking up at lights in metal housing, sensing the deja-vu.  Tonight they were playing a sort of reggae version of Cat Stevens' Wild World, pressing my nostalgia buttons, firing off endless flares of memory in that space where you are sweaty and tired, trying to collect your body and consolidate your energy for the night ahead or the walk home, sensing the ceiling as floor, the floor as a kind of springboard.  Sometimes our teachers would turn out the lights so we would become dancers without ego, without legs or arms-- floating corpses on a padded wooden sea of past choreography.  A kind of relief that it was over, a kind of sadness that every class, every routine, every performance has an ending.  An enforced rest-- the calm after the intense physical storm.

A friend called at 5 AM last night.  He confessed that every time he fell asleep he sensed that he might not wake up, and he would then force himself awake:  one of the many variations of insomnia that seem to be  afflicting my aging creative friends.  Sleep haunts people--evades us, tricks us.  I was so tired last night-- an exhausting week with nominal rest-- and I awoke startled from some disturbing dream, felt my heart pounding from some terror or dread… and got up like a psychic to answer calls.  Sleep is a kind of Catch-22 for some of us… a challenge, a dread-- something that steals our creative hours, consecrates our passions and consumes time…. like a friend whose company we crave, even though we know she will pickpocket and deceive us-- betray us while we are happily unconscious and ignorant.

My doorman has a new baby.  He is excited and reports to me every day.  Last night was the first relentless sleepless night.  The baby had a crying jag--- maybe colic, maybe some small discomfort-- maybe his evening milk was bitter… but he seemed inconsolable.  So complex, these infants who cannot communicate-- only cry.  Mothers learn to distinguish these cries-- hunger from pain from discomfort, colic from teething.  Sometimes it just sounds like fear and you convince yourself this is impossible… that besides the trauma of birth-- how can these emotions manifest?  Or maybe the ingrained fear of abandonment, the initial separation-- maybe this is valid and universal and we are virtually born with death in our DNA and the subconscious knowledge that we will be ultimately left, no matter how good or beautiful we are.  We will lose our audience, our friends, our lovers, our family-- our selves.  The baby knows this, somehow, and has no control or comfort.  You hold it and rock it and feed it and nothing works.  A tiny night terror.  You hope this will not become habitual.

Do babies dream?  Science says they do-- the way dogs dream, within the realm of experience, subconscious and electrical brain impulse… and maybe this was a first nightmare-- maybe it was being 'set' somehow in this tiny psyche, and would become the nightmare homepage.  The deep fear or terror which weaves itself into our soul, becomes part of our dance-- our walk, our thought process and decision-making.

Another friend called at 6 AM.  He has lost all structure-- the boundaries between night and day have disintegrated.  This happens to musicians, in a good way.  We are outside of biological patterns and the rule of daily sunrise and sunset.  We are free-- we work when we work, play when we play, eat when we eat…. sleep when we sleep-- or not.  But it wreaks havoc with our sense of continuity-- our structure.  Walls blur, floors move, light taunts and 'straight' life seems disconnected.  We are outsiders… party people when we are young-- edge-makers and trend-setters… and a little daft and baffled when we are old-- fragile and twig-like we dream through glass and float on falling bedclothes.  Our nightmares are often things that have happened, things that will not happen… our dread is the alarm clock, our ambition becomes the nod, our eyes close just as they are about to see.

I tried so hard to understand my doorman's baby… as I tried to understand my own baby boy, who has always been such a good sleeper.  Through injury, through troubles, through break-ups, victories and losses-- he sleeps.  As for me, I hear the Knell song… like a nostalgic old soundtrack the meaning haunts every phase of my post-dance physical malaise-- from little girls in pink leotards to women in yoga clothes, executing choreography designed for way younger people-- trying our hardest to conform to a group, to hear the commands and the music as it evolves…. a lot of nice things turn bad out there… the song warns… I'll always remember you, like a child, girl… I was not much more than a child when I first heard that record… the word always sounds so different now that it has become stretched into a fuller lifetime, now that most of my years are in the past rather then the future.  I suppose every song has its Knell… every dance has its ending… every room has the ceiling you can turn into a floor if you squint and dream.

My boy is a man.  He doesn't share his terrors; he has few, I think.  I have plenty of 'knell', that's certain.  Enough for 5 generations and then some.  Words like 'time' and 'dark' and 'rain' and 'sad' have an extra prick for me.  Love has an edge… desire has a black lining… even 'baby' has a certain heart-shaped soft-shell.  Skin…

My fiancee many years back was deported from the country.   Denied entrance-- sent back.  A forced separation like a violent emotional amputation.  We'd been so attached, so physically interwoven.  It was unbearable for a while… and then I began to swim.  Lap after lap in a dark blue pool, as though I was drowning in my own tears, I found the backstroke… where I could stare up at the ceiling lights like stars, like a  swimmer in a kind of empty Egyptian tomb… silent and alone… a version of rehearsal for the nights I've come to embrace of late: wet soundtracks and the blue light of slow morning.  The unpredictable strokes of sleep-- words in my head, questions in my heart, missing children and lost loves at my side, and now the Knell… like an unlit candle…. not even calling… just there, like the sense of church bells or the way most of us go from day to night to day--knowing and not knowing, listening and not listening, seeing and not seeing, fearing and not fearing, loving and not loving, remembering and forgetting, turning down some old bedclothes in vain, calling out through dreams, turning reluctantly and bravely toward some version of light…

Death Without Interruptions

I am trying to make friends with Death.  He has been flirting with way too many of my friends and his recent moves to consummate a few of these relationships have forced me to rethink my strategy.  While we are generally reassured that these incidents come in threes, there was yet a fourth last week.   Admittedly, my 'stepmother' the artist did take her own life.  She cheated Death, in her way, and he did not like that.  He expects to beat you at his game, not have you put yourself in checkmate and deprive him of his victory rush.  So he pulled another trick?  The fact is, he lost count, long ago.  He has way too many fingers.

If you've been reading my essays, you know that I've seen him in Chelsea.  Summer heat doesn't phase Death; under wraps his cold breath gives him away.  He likes the galleries; he's rather vain and is sure to see himself in a painting or two on any given day.  Andy liked to include him-- a shadow, a symbol or a doppelgänger; maybe it pissed him off.  He's in all the trendy fashion houses, in one form or another, and as we all know--- he has great taste in music.  He is a patient lover: he can be violent and cruel, or he can be gentle and invisible.  But he will eventually come to all of us, whether we embrace him or fear him, whether we court him or evade him; he will come.

Personally he fucks with my head.  I feel responsible; I feel guilty and inadequate.  He reminds me of my father who try as I might, does not love me as a daughter.  Okay… my cousin was old--- he was ill and had come to a boundary; his passing was a blessing.  My stepmother?  She feared her end.  She was an artist and she wanted an audience, she wanted recognition; she wanted a guaranteed choir of mourners.  Death taunted her-- held a cruel mirror before her vanity.  She'd once painted for her lovers and now she'd outlived every single one.  I was a lone voice for her; my love and admiration was not enough.  She was cranky and bitter in her last weeks, and the truth is, I was avoiding her.  She scolded me; I reminded her of failure.  Even at the end, she left a small pile of envelopes, and I waited in vain for mine.  No sentimentality; her only request, as always, is for me to disperse her art-- to find collectors, to enhance her legacy.  I am the designated 'sweeper' of her leavings.  Nothing more.  I could have pimped for her. Maybe she would have stuck it out.  Sometimes Death makes you a star; sometimes you don't even make the New York Times obituaries unless you pay.

My lovely drummer who passed…. he used to bring me small trinkets from his trips-- purses, tiny elephants from Thailand, cloth fans and memorabilia.  At some point last year I cleaned my closet and donated bags of these things.  So now I feel guilty.  I searched my closet for a souvenir--- nothing.  I somehow brought this on, with my callow attitude toward his sweetness and sentimentality.  After all, he was young-- who could anticipate I would outlive him?  I am guilty.

And that woman in Chelsea--- it was serendipitous that we had met through a mutual friend.  Who could have conceived that she would chase her dog into the arms of Death in the form of a garbage truck? Her dog?  I forgot to ask.  I doubt he feels guilty.  But I do.  I wish we'd never met.

At my cousin's funeral his children remembered poignant moments.  They were loved, had wonderful lives with and without him.  It was perfect.  I wept.  I thought of my own father-- -the one who can't bear the sound of my voice, the mention of my name-- -for Death knows what reason.  I can't think of a single tender moment.  My sister methodically stole my packet of M & Ms every day for years.  I willingly gave up my toys, my allowance-- I took the blame for every bit of family mischief.  She has the birthright-- whether it is fair or unfair, I am glad to stay out of the family spotlight.  My father owes me an apology.  Besides marrying rock musicians and turning down a Harvard Law scholarship… what did I do to him?  I offended his legacy.  I failed to enhance his family with suitable accomplishments.  I work in bars.  I was a single mother.  This is the 21st century.  But he is ashamed.  I did what I could; I paid him back.  I gave them the art I'd lovingly collected through my friends.  I paid my sister and her husband and put her kids through college while I took an oath of poverty and devotion to music.  I am a Goth nun.  You'd think I blackmailed them.  They have weddings and parties and exchange gifts.  My son got a check for $100 for his combined 21st birthday, Christmas and college graduation.  We have many nights gone hungry  Not even a card.  A folded check in a small envelope.

I have dedicated songs to my father; I post his military accolades on my Facebook page.  I honor him in the only way that I can.  None of this matters.  He will take his hatred to the grave and I will not have a seat at his funeral.  Whatever he thinks I did, I did not do.  Death-- tell him.  Whisper.  I go to funerals, I take care of my friends.  I'm guilty.  I give money to homeless people and split my last-dollar hotdog today with a hungry man in the street.  I never stole from him or lied to him or cheated.  I won all those awards.  I even bought him a computer once with money I won and he complained.  So I give up.  Death, compared to my father, is just.  He spared me a few times-- he's whispered in my ear and sat on my bed through a couple of nights…and mysteriously as he entered, in the morning he was gone.

I finally got the nerve to visit my stepmother's apartment; the very room where she put a plastic bag over her head and inhaled lethal quantities of helium several days ago.  Kind of a stagey exit, but painless and effective.  It looked exactly the same; the bed was made, the Saramago I loaned her on the nightstand, the smell of helium was nowhere.  Death had vanished-- no wagging fingers, no morbid reminders.  Just the art, like an albatross--- like guilt mirrors around the room.  But I'll rise to the challenge.  Death has no wish to participate.  It's too late for dying young, he coolly whispered to me as I lay awake the other night… and then, dressed like the 1961 Elvis, he left the room.