Santa Clause

Like an old deer in a city park, I am beginning to pick up the scent of Christmas.  When I think of shopping-- merchandise-- well, tears are all the currency I can muster; even the pounds of butter for cookies will be tough to manage this season.  Thank goodness I conned my son into picking up a bargain tree on Black Friday.  Having a good month with it makes me less guilty about kidnapping nature for selfish decor reasons.  Yes, it's a symbol, and it certainly receives plenty of love and attention in its place by the shelves of vinyl and my double bass-- but come the New Year it gets put out on the curb for recycling, stripped of its finery, and I feel like a cruel step-parent.  Anyway, it is in its domestic adolescence, still drinking up water and I love the smell.  It is my companion, my forest.  I wake mornings to the banging radiator and the piney ghost-aura of Christmases past.

I am closing in on another lifeline benchmark;  it is also the first holiday without my mother.  She would not have believed my age; during our last visits, she refused to believe the woman before her was truly me.  My daughter, she laughed quizzically with those famous eyebrows roof-high?  My daughter is young and so beautiful.  You-- you're not my daughter!  I had to agree, in the end.  I am no longer that girl; I am quite someone else, becoming, every year, still another version of this woman in whose skin I feel not quite myself ('Mice elf', as Sly with cleverness observed).

On Saturday afternoons I often gallery-sit.  It provides a little extra income and keeps my finger in the art pie where all of them once wallowed and explored.  I take the train to Union Square and walking west I can't help observing there is a blossoming colony of homeless or hapless people-- most of them young, with signs, blankets, home goods, possessions, wares for sale.  There are couples and small groups.  Many of them have pets-- dogs, cats on leads, animals wearing sweaters and T-shirts, bandanas and hats, reminding me of the old Tompkins Square population from the 1970's.  There is money in their cups and bowls; tourists and locals chat and pet the animals who are the pimps, in a way, for donations.  People are uncomfortable with poverty and homelessness, but the animals seem to be an ice-breaker.  Many of the young people are reading; they might be students living on the edge, relying on charity to make room and board.  These days I have so little extra; a few dollars each month and my own skill at thrift keeps me from the street.  I pass, I empathize, I apologize silently, and I say a prayer thanking God for another  month of eking by.

There is coffee at the gallery.  The space is luxe and white and the reverb is perfect for recording vocals.  The objects are expensive and beautiful.  I am comfortable with these; I understand their history and their context.  The irony of my life is that I was brought up in museums, among cultural institutions-- I studied art and history and architecture and despite the extreme financial circumstances which ally me with the culture of homelessness, I am steeped in the love and lore of art and at home in this place.  During the week salespeople and stylists and media-experts bring clients in and out; on Saturdays it is church-like; no one calls, and celebrities and billionaires come in to shop low-profile-style.  We are connected by affection and understanding of these things despite the fact that I cannot even afford to buy lunch.  I also encourage students and passersby to browse; I am instructed not to let anyone use the bathrooms but find this kind of rule difficult to enforce.  I am a populist and also know, from years of gallery work, all visitors deserve the same hospitality.

This week there was a plumbing issue and the bathrooms were off limits.  Mid-afternoon, in the first snow of the year, a young woman came in-- wet and snow-dusted, wide-eyed and sweet-faced, and asked to use the washroom.  I had to explain-- felt a tiny pang of awkwardness, knowing the policy of places like this one… but she was cordial and spent some time looking around.  I was speaking on the phone to a relative, admitting my dark mood and still coming to terms with the sad week I'd had-- the loss of another close friend and musician.  I'd been not just on the verge of tears all week… in fact, since the fall leaves began to turn, I haven't been the same, as my Mom might have pointed out, had she lived another season.  The girl left; I apologized again.  

Maybe it was the weather-- the beautiful quiet snow, the dark afternoon, the Christmas lights through the window,  the hangover from yet another funeral, the sense of the dying year… but I was feeling bleak and isolated.  Gigs are getting sparse-- book sales are slow, my holiday calendar is quite blank.  I will see my son-- he will have a brief rest from his work; maybe it is his missing father-- his slightly handicapped childhood, but he rarely expresses much emotion.  He seems so 'normal'-- I do not often expose him to my 'shadow'.  His father-- my husband-- was a happy-go-lucky boyish sort of person who embraced love and marriage with great alacrity, but not so much the 'to the exclusion of all others' clause.   I never nagged or complained; I left.  It didn't bother me that he never sent a penny; only when he complained to the next crop of spouses that he was crippled from child support payments.

At the end of the afternoon a girl came in again--- left something on the desk-- I was about to call after her, when I saw it was the same girl-- and she'd left a lovely wrapped cookie… with a note, saying I seemed to need some cheer-- and whatever it was, she could tell I was a strong woman and would overcome the darkness.  I burst into tears-- like the touch of angel.   It wasn't just that in this culture of phone-addiction and shallow human interaction it's so rare someone actually reaches out to a human (as opposed to a sad dog), but also that I remembered being that person-- the one who felt things, whose daily empathy called for these gestures and this sort of gift-giving and random affection to strangers.  It isn't just that I look different as I age, but that my limited lifestyle has also limited my generosity of soul.  I cried for my lost heart, for the girl I was and now suddenly missed so terribly, realizing my mother was maybe more astute than I knew.

I locked up and went back uptown in a cloud of quiet tears camouflaged by the falling snowflakes, mourning not just my friends but my old self… trying hard to absorb the Christmas message.  After my solitary spartan supper at home, I found her cookie-- realizing with a bit of horror it had been so long since I'd treated myself to anything-- and I loved every bit; it was healthy and handmade and filled with festive ingredients and just so good.  While I was busy worrying, struggling to maintain my minimal post-parental life in the 21st-century city which is not kind to the poor and the non-spending population, I had neglected more important things-- my soul, my heart, my own kindness not just to others but to myself.  Thanking you, Kayleigh (she signed the note) for reminding me; maybe you are truly an angel, the ghost of my Christmas past, come to bring me not just a gift, but-- like the old story, an awakening.

Snow Lies

I could have made a decent paycheck this week if I could only have agreed to blog the Academy Awards.  Of course, they don't particularly care that I have haven't seen any of the nominated movies--- not a single one, except maybe a documentary because I actually was conscripted to attend a random screening by the filmmaker.  But these are movies not films.  The difference, to me, being the hype and promotion, the 'blow-up' factor.

It's hard for me to diagnose the exact cause of my movie-going malaise.  It could be my age, or the fact that after seeing thousands upon thousands of these-- they become a little cheap-- like a roller coaster ride, over and over.  It's terrifying or amazing, but in the end, we can only remember maybe the first time-- or the time someone threw up on you.  Like I remember a movie-date, when I really liked the guy… or making out with my husband, because that's what we did at the movies.  But I was young.

And of course I won't venture the theory that these movies are not, besides the sensational trailer campaigns and the celebrity overkill, what we used to call 'memorable'.  That they don't resonate in the way that 'On the Waterfront' or 'The Hustler' did… the way these actors used to 'be' their characters… that try as I might, with a few exceptions, I just see celebrities.

I did try to watch the show.  I noticed things like the camera focusing on black people in the audience to compensate for the fact that there was hardly a minority face among the high-profile nominees.  Maybe that explains the Birdman wins?  A Mexican director?  Who knows?

What I did think about was the fact that our television sets, in my day, were black and white boxes.  Actors were miniaturized and the format was square.  The resolution was not great.  The larger the set, the less clarity.  So the movies were larger than life, colored-- you could see  places you might never visit, you could scrutinize the imperfect and breathtakingly passionate face of Richard Burton and you knew you would never ever be these people or these characters and it was stunning.

Maybe 25 years ago I was invited to the home of some prep-school parents who liked musicians.  Not only did they have a complete 24-track studio and rows of guitars no one could really play, but they had their own private screening room.  It was a mini-cinema with leather reclining chairs like first class airline seats.  The speakers were surround-sound and the screen was cinema-scale.  They had some kind of expensive format projector or who knows?  A movie collection.  Of course, like the other 'playrooms' in the house,  including a simulated ski-ing machine with visual moving slopes, it was immaculate and empty.  Everything at their fingertips, these people--pushbuttons and electronic wonderment-- and they were hardly ever home.  Their kids were brats.

My Thanksgiving tradition includes my son coming over to sleep and eat and binge on sports and this year, he begged me to splurge on a new TV.  I have no cellphone, and had an old, small box.  It was getting to the point where even the sports scores were 'off-screen' because my set didn't accommodate the format.  So we got a black Friday spectacular 42-inch screen for very little money… and after my brief adjustment period I have only just begun to 'see' what others have been seeing on their high-def technology for years.  It's pretty spectacular… the visual… clearer than clear.  When my son calls me from a Knicks game, I can see him waving.  Amazing.

But one thing I have noticed-- the lines between cinema and television are blurring.  It is so symptomatic of our culture now-- people with their palatial apartments and oversized homes-- that now we all have a private screening room… and 4 million movies available to us at all times.  I still have my Time Warner triple play--- I don't want HBO and I don't want to be addicted to TV.  I haven't watched a  single Breaking Bad or Madmen episode or even Downton Abbey…I like the randomness of TV, and now that we all have a cinematic format and video quality--- and everyone from Apple to Amazon to your neighbor is producing 'television'… movies are marketed like anything which is cheap and downloadable and viewable on phones while you have a bath.  Or drive in your SUV and cause accidents…whatever.  Everyone has everything everywhere, like a rich person.  And it feels cheap.

Does anyone remember being in love--- really in love?  Not the kind you will marry or possess because it doesn't work that way, but the kind where you are overcome with passion and you 'lift' out of your own body and you are possessed and then there you are, the 2 of you, in some bed somewhere which you will remember for the rest of your life, where you lie  awake because it is your own movie and you need to press this into your heart forever, where you are aware you have slept with some kind of angel, and you have been touched or maybe ruined forever, but it is real.  And maybe this will last for days or weeks or months or maybe years.  Maybe it will come and go, will weave in and out of your life, like a cosmic glowing thread of light, maybe you will become pregnant and bear its child… but it will not stay.  And in the hours or days or weeks, between those episodes, love happens.  You do not text, because that was not available.  You don't even telephone, because you are under a spell, and the technology of even a wire and a receiver-- it seems well, awkward.  You might write a letter and post it, and it will take weeks before you even know it is received, if ever.  You might get a tiny box in the mail with a hand-rolled cigarette or a pressed flower, or a fortune from an old cookie… and it will be from him.  But it is in the space which surrounds these moments--- that the experience becomes something.

In art, space is essential--- real art, that is.  It is what you leave out that is important.  Now, we have no space.  Even my oversized flatscreen during the Academy Awards is crammed with finery and entertainment… thousands of beautiful people and too much music, and film, and live people-- the actors, reminding us that everything is not really art, but a 'layer', an investment, a trick.  People are maybe not really crying, even… we see these little cameos and it is confusing… it is just too much.   In a way it is like massive quantities of food without digestion.  It is all too much.  Everyone is dressed in loaned gowns and the after and before-shows insure that there is no space anywhere.  What is the meaning?

I suppose without the ball and the gown, the Prince would never have noticed Cinderella.  This is an old story.  And without the 'space' of losing her and having to try the shoe on all those girls-- he would never have found his true princess.  Maybe that explains the current obsession with shoes, the celebrity closets with a banker's salary worth of shoes.  Hoarders.

There used to be an expression… you can't have everything; where would you put it?  But now you can put it in your phone, on a chip. It's in your pocket… your money, your airline tickets, 10,000 movies.  Rich people are creating space in the New York skyline so they can own more and more, have bigger screens for their personal lives.  But this is not the kind of space they need.  They don't see that they are starving for the kind of space that they no longer understand-- the kind of space that exists while you miss someone or you want something so badly you must work seven years to have it.  Occasionally a movie director understands this, and tries to show this-- the most archetypal legend of existence-- the search, the quest…what makes us fragile and divine and raises us above our flesh and bones-- our soul peeking out of its human garbage pile of 'stuff'.

I went to a funeral for my friend on Saturday.  It was a devastating loss for me of someone who suffered from cultural under-acknowledgment because we are obsolete, we seekers of music or art or truth among the technology we can't even afford.  My niece had emailed me; a friend of hers OD'd.  I shared some of Vvedensky's Gray Notebook which I was reading.  Brutal and real.  Re: the funeral, It was so hard to see Joy in a box, I mailed her back.  She thought it was the title.  Maybe it is.

Small Change

When I was in college there was this eccentric professor who walked up and down Nassau Street hunched over in an ancient trench coat, scanning the sidewalks for loose change.  Not the 'Beautiful Mind' mathematician-- this man taught 19th century European painting-- although in the 1970's there were all kinds of characters who lurked in university towns.  Anyway, it was rumored that he picked up an additional $4,000 a year from his activity.

The other night on the uptown A, a middle aged woman was nodding out, leaning forward-- small coins falling out of her pockets.  I made an effort to collect some of them, and put them on the seat.  Once or twice she startled, and brushed them off her coat like live bugs.  I couldn't help remembering the old blind beggar on our corner when my son was small… with his bucket and his German Shepherd, swaying back and forth like Stevie at the piano.  My son would collect pennies in a jar and bring them by on his little wagon.  The blind guy would feel around and ask him 'there ain't no quarters or nothin'? and my son would solemnly swear they were all pennies (he had no clue about value-- he loved Abraham Lincoln) and toddle off.

Last Saturday on my way to Chelsea, an unsmiling girl in a long dress was working the train-- a child in her arms, one on the way.  She had a sign explaining she'd lost her job, she had 2 kids, etc.  She stopped in front of every passenger and stared, brazenly.  So many people just looked through her, busy and rude with their earbuds or their phones.  I was down to a post-Thanksgiving $3 and change; I gave her the coins and she glared at me.  I glared back.  Something about using her kids as props-- it turns me off.  How many people pass us, every single day, and ask for something?  I usually give some recycled coins, even if this infuriates the ones that expect at the very least a dollar.

Plenty of nights after I had a baby I wondered where I'd get the day's food, how I'd split a banana 4 ways, how I never, ever got that child support check--- not even $100.  Ever.  How I could never fathom that somewhere in London an alcoholic journalist was obliterating the image of those tiny trusting newborn eyes that look for the first time.  That picture that no one ever gets-- because it is the supreme unphotographable intimacy.  Not just love and a permanent daily Valentine, but a contract.  I couldn't ask; I couldn't yell or whine or even write.  That little wrinkled brand-new serious face that has nothing in its experience but this dialogue of eyes.  It is yours-- maybe the only thing that ever really belonged to you-- your living poem, your perfect pearl that came from all the sandy edgy torment of this love, this marriage which you knew would be hard, but then came this, the final unfathomable riddle.

Money in the street… I was fierce and unrelenting.  There were days this got us through.  Tiny liquid assets-- lost and found change.

Before my friend Jeanne died, she told me every time I saw a dime on the street, it was her angel, giving me a wink.   Some weeks I need Jeanne.  I miss her wild beauty and her reckless behavior.  No one in my life is a 'bad influence' anymore.  But I keep my eyes peeled for coins in the street.  They are a sign-- luck-- a gift.

I woke up in the night, last night, as I often do-- with a song in my head, a poem on my tongue… and for a brief instant, as I reached for the pen and pad, I time-tripped and took a second or two to orient myself in the present:  post-Thanksgiving, kids back home in their own apartment-- my parental work done, more or less… and a line surfaced from Ann Lauterbach…something about remembering the hour but not the passage (sic).  And suddenly I felt this sense of mourning for all the lost poets, for their final hours when they realized that this was the final poem--- that all of the time they spent fretting over language, shopping, going for walks, pining for a great love-- regretting, drinking, eating and hanging out, smoking… making love…. oh, the hours and days and weeks and untiring months we spend with our hearts filled to capacity and entering a body which will have no relevance at the final moment of dying…all of this will not buy us the time to write another poem-- or even just one more line.

My friend called to tell me he is sleeping with a woman 25 years too young.  For her this will be an episode; for him it could be an epic sorrow, a small coin of life he will imbue with huge value, because he is older and the moments we have spent are tonnage against the dwindling number we have left.  And really, I tell him--- he is not just expecting but looking for the heart wreck because most of us have learned that we don't really feel our hearts until they are broken, the way we take our legs and hands for granted until we have an accident.  So a heartbreak is a reminder--- and the minutes that pass in sorrow are the long ones, and children would rather have 100 shiny pennies than one crumpled ugly old dollar.

On the street tonight I had my eyes peeled; I needed the angel to come, even though it is really only a dime, and it is we the poets and believers who light up the moments, who give these crumbs of life magic, these coins in the gutter sewage which under the night lamps sparkle like diamonds even though they might be nothing but a circle of spit.

The Letter

Priorities shift on rainy nights.  People drop money with more frequency.  They are rushing and careless and the sound of the rain masks the sound of things falling.  Fewer people show up at their gym.  They park cars carelessly, they drink more; they eat more.  It is a bad time to make a lasting decision; especially an emotional decision.

The sound of passing cars on a rainy night always reminds me of waiting.  I was glad tonight to get home early; I walked back not caring what the rain did to my hair or my shoes.  I took my time, picked up a few coins from the sidewalk, petted a few miserable neighborhood dogs who leaned sheepishly against their walkers, regretting that they asked to be taken out.  At a Madison Avenue corner, a coat and hat was draped over a mailbox.  As I got closer, I realized there was a body inside.  It moved, and I asked if I could help.  The man, who was not more than 35, waved me on-- reeked of whiskey.  Sick, maybe--- or just too drunk to walk.   Waiting, maybe.  For a text, for a car, for a bus… for someone who wasn't coming.  I stood under an awning and watched; he nearly fell into the road a couple of times, and managed to hoist himself up onto the steel curve of the box, like a human back.  The Federal Government helping someone in ways they never intended.  I couldn't leave; I was writing all versions of his sad story-- the diagnosis,  the long and unbearable last days of his terminally ill wife; maybe he'd just come from the hospital-- -the final night.  Or he'd lost his job, his girlfriend had had enough-- his kids told him he's a loser-- his boss caught him in an insider trading scheme…

When I was young and newly married in London, it rained for all 30 days of my first month.  The quiet of our flat, compared to the constant sounds of New York City, was oppressive and strange for me.  My husband was a journalist and worked late; I found myself cooking and waiting like a doll-wife in a doll-house.  I had no friends and even the telephone felt awkward in my hand.  I knew I'd never stay-- it all felt so unreal for me-- and yet I was determined to stay and learn how to play the wife.  It was both sad and happy when my husband came home; he always felt like a stranger.  I could never have married anyone more familiar because my whole concept of marriage was so outside anything that felt like 'me'.   And yet, I loved the way he looked, the way he spoke, and treated me-- like a television sitcom newlywed.  He would have a drink and tell me about his day.  We would go to bed and make love, and he would sleep while I lay awake listening to the rain and the quiet, trying to 'place' myself in the strangeness of the new city.

Of course I eventually realized we were both playing house, and despite a mutual passion, we never really 'crossed over'.  I missed my life.  I missed laughing with my New York friends.  I felt like a foreigner in the city where everyone spoke my language but no one seemed to understand me.  I missed my husband-- even though he was there, and was attentive and perfect, outside of a few drinks too many.  He felt my discomfort and began to panic-- to worry, to agonize, and then to stray.  I was relieved.  It gave me a reason to leave, even though I was already pregnant with his son.

I came back to New York with my huge stomach and the terrifying prospect of motherhood, and then I missed him even more.  I began to realize there was nowhere, ever, from that point on, where I would ever feel 'right';  that the clarity of the distant past is maybe elusive-- and maybe it was never there, although we are all sure of our first loves, and maybe even our second-- of our first heartbreak, and the pure joy of winning something.  But I still couldn't stay,  and whatever tragic consequences I've suffered-- the misgivings, the regrets, the bad dreams and the missing-- all the missing--- well, I am responsible, at least partially.

Tonight there are more sirens than usual; this is a rain-related phenomenon, too, I think.  I am tempted to go back out and see if one of these is for my mailbox man, but I stop and convince myself that a person who couldn't manage to face her own fairytale when it was there cannot possibly unravel the unhappy ending of someone else's.

I was born during hard winter.  I was always relieved that I wouldn't have to face a rainy birthday; it was either cold and sunny or snowing, which is a soft blessing, and not a disappointment.  I feel safe here at the moment; even the early morning birds are not singing, not warning me that I should have slept and I haven't.

So maybe the mailbox guy had to to vomit and needed an anchor.  Maybe he needed a short nap.  Maybe he just couldn't face his nagging wife and kids after a long day, and her resentment that he'd taken the time to have a few when she had slaved over a meal and bla bla bla.  I never stuck around long enough to get there; I feared someone looking at me the way the mailbox man looked at me when I asked if I could help-- with that screwed up crooked face asking silently who the fuck I thought I was to insert myself in his rainy night.

There's a woman on the 6th floor with a bulgy eye who is hostile and a little crazy.  She is bitter and has persecution fantasies and calls the police on her neighbors.  She doesn't pay her rent and defends herself in court and win or lose costs our building thousands.   I am kind to her but tonight in the elevator she accused me of conspiring with the members of the Coop Board.  The rain is affecting her.  I start thinking she could audition for a zombie B-film.  I want to ask her to mail a letter for me.  That makes me smile, and she turns up the volume until I get out on my floor.

Maybe the mailbox guy was one of those visiting angels who will vanish.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to see him; maybe it was a mirage-- a cartoon character who shouldn't have crossed over.  I am home now, getting messages from a booking agent who wants Blues.  Blues, he says.  Yeah, that works for me.  So we'll give him blues.  John Lee Hooker used to sing something about a letter.  He never learned to read or write.  I know I'll never look at that mailbox the same way.  It's become a symbol, the way that most things in our lives become when we just have had enough of what is real or what we want to be real, and we are tired of waiting and tired of missing, and all we have is the slithery sound of wet tires on asphalt and a pair of old boots drying like tired dogs in the dawn half-light.