Bedeviled

Ever since the pandemic began, I've confessed several times to a television habit-- difficult as it is to follow the war in Ukraine these nights; the footage is beyond upsetting, the awareness of sitting in a safe room processing the horror provokes a kind of shame.  This weekend, with the NCAA games as distraction, I nearly overdosed.  I swore I'd avoid the Academy Awards but found myself tuning in just in time to see a few choice moments-- including the Will Smith debacle. 

I'm sure every blogger, journalist, critic, and mouthpiece has had a go at this today.  For me, I knew little of the marriage back-story; I'm old enough that a 20-something year achievement seems unimpressive, although I'm aware that Hollywood years are like dog-ages to the rest of us.  Still, what I did gather is that Will Smith seemed unhinged.  Not just upset or motivated or protective-- literally unhinged.  More than met the camera-eye. 

Of course I'm sort of a Hollywood-hater.  I haven't fallen in love with a movie for some time, now.  Nothing seems inventive or world-beating.  The glam and prep for these events far exceeds the content.  Such is life these days.  And with the world situation as it is, although these superstars and celebrities sympathized and supported the Ukrainian cause, these productions just seem-- well, faithless.  

The whole weekend was kind of a wash-- a storm of bad news and dismay and death.  Taylor Hawkins-- for anyone that plays rock and roll-- is a dream drummer.  He's animated and showmanly, and he plays his ass off-- sings, too.  It's a shock. Of course 50 is nearly twice the proverbial age of tragic loss, but it seems young to me.  I watched over and over footage of their more recent concerts; you try to find something-- some reason, some 'key'... He often took the microphone and sang before an audience.  It takes rock and roll balls to do this, to an arena-crowd.  He had that extra-energy-- the kind that comes often from the drug of performance, but also the kind that comes from a glassine envelope.  Something was not right.  And then it was all wrong.

Saturday evening on the way home I stopped at the Affordable Art Fair.  Granted, I'm tired of my own art-snobbery and disappointment... but honestly there was nothing I wanted to afford. The people exhibiting were so nice and courteous and the gallery staff just enthusiastic and generous-- but I felt sorry for them.  This has nothing to do with art.  It was desperate and meaningless and tarted-up with visual quotes of celebrity images and familiar art memes.  I ran into a friend who was buying a photograph (one of an edition) that reminded him of another photographer whose work reminds me of a Warholian car crash.  I wanted to say to him... look at this-- look at this painting.. there is something obviously missing here... but he doesn't see... maybe even the maker doesn't see-- or doesn't care. When in any reality does a sculpted hamburger take the place of something cooked?  Somewhere there is a line.  Things begin with a line.

Last night at 4 AM I was awakened by a gunshot.  One single shot.  It is unmistakable, this sound, and in a culture and time where suicide has become trendy and topical, it is worrying.  Or violence.  22 shots, they counted in Young Dolph's body...  21 more than he needed.  99 problems...  I am trying hard to get my broken friends to stop nursing their weaknesses, counting pains and issues.  We step out, I tell them.  We pull ourselves up into some kind of presentable walking creature.  We do this.  We are strong; we walk out onstage, like Taylor Hawkins did night after night... we lift weights and carry things. 

King Richard.  Like so many of the Shakespearean royals unhinged by just the pressures of responsibility and the pangs of remorse-- fear of failure, craving for heroic adulation.  Hollywood actors crawl on bloody knees for the success so few of them achieve.  Many hate themselves, despite all the press and hype and good deeds.  It's an unsustainable situation... and it's short-lived.  I remember well cheering my son at games which are equally forgettable and forgotten, but many of them punctuated with a trophy or a symbol; a brief championship.  These show up in thrift shop shelves... or at those memorabilia auctions.  One doesn't know who will be collectible in the end.  Life intervenes and dilutes. 

What I do know is the message of violence is heinous and immature. It's a punch in the face we'd all like to deliver somewhere, but here we are condemning Putin for his war-tantrum and behavior like an upset child with the power to threaten the world.  Nothing worse than a boy with a loaded gun. Not all of us have an audience-- or even a global live audience.  Those NCAA basketball players-- some of them threw their balls up in the air and failed to see them land squarely.  They pushed and shoved a little too hard-- they are boys, and defeat is tough to handle--especially when it is so fleeting and decisive.  They foul out, they receive a technical slap on their hand. In the NBA they are fined.  

It wasn't just the violence with no rebuttal... it was the disturbing acceptance speech, as well... the selfish/unselfish rhetoric of a privileged human-- talented, no question.  But unhinged, the way many of us feel.  The tears were not right.  We were a captive not a captivated audience.  There he was with a stage and a forum to deliver something. We squirmed in disbelief as we watched a man self-destructing.   I wonder what my friend the psychiatrist would say-- the one who calls me out consistently for my inconsistencies and vapid confessions.

I am singing for Ukraine, a girl announced onstage the other night.  I am painting for Ukraine, an artist tweeted... look at me, look at me. At your highest point, Denzel (the other King) quipped, the devil will come for you.   Not to mention your lowest point-- your final swan-song, your night of carousing, your career zenith which may haunt you forever because it is the ledge from which you fell, from which you are measured.  At 53 with a massive career of accomplishments, this was not simply an act of passion-- a bad decision.  

We are not enough, we humans. We have lost the thread of humanity; we have lost the content-- the purity-- the meaning of art.  The soul. It's not enough.  It's not good enough or tough enough or funny enough and it's not going to matter, in the long run.  Most award winners are doomed to become jeopardy questions and record-book entries.  The devil is winning, my friend said to me the other night. He is everywhere, maybe... certainly in the White House at the end of 2020... but one thing is for sure; even he is unreliable.  As David Grohl well knows... in the end, all alone is all we are (repeat ad infinitum...).

Loaded

Okay.  I went to my gynecologist yesterday---hadn’t been to see him way longer than the recommended interval, but there it is.  I’ve had the same doctor since high school.  Until last year, he literally had barely spoken to me-- the way I like it.  You want the person who’s clinically intimate to be non-intrusive.  He’s also appropriately non-judgmental,  matter-of-factly used to rattle off potential hazards when I needed such information,  dismantled anxiety by his unusual calm and slightly bored delivery.  Everything is perceived as 'normal’ even if it isn’t--- even if it is an emergency or a sorrow, or you need an abortion in menopause, or you have a miscarried twin, or an accident or a fear.  Routine. 

There was a time in my life when I had kind of a crush on my gynecologist.  In the exam room, fantasy helps you.  I think I'd seen him on the street-- he was a ‘guy’…tall and kind of handsome, had a good marriage from all reports, 4 okay kids…  and I have to admit--- he has this great ‘touch’…like few doctors do, and most of these are women—like he understands me. 

But yesterday, he breaks character and asks me if I’d be part of a study he was doing--- a new drug—no side effects—to effectively ‘rejuvenate’ my sexuality, above and below the waist.  I hate medicine of any sort.  He knows this.  But, he claims… I would feel more like having sex.  I would feel 25 again.  So of course, I respond…’What makes you think I want to feel 25 again?’  And he laughs,  says—I’d feel better about myself.  My sex drive.  And I ask him if he thinks a little plastic surgery and a haircut by someone besides my guitar player with a straightedge might make me feel better about myself?  I mean, do I look like someone who obsesses about personal cosmetics?  I don’t even know how to put on makeup.  He has a little laugh.

So this morning, I get a phone call from him… immediately I recognize his leveled, monotonal voice—old-school, to let me know everything is status quo, and have I thought over his proposal?  I need some smart women to help me, he almost cajoles… You mean sarcastic and verbal and sharp-tongued?  That, too, he admits.  So is this a medical version of Sex and the City or an actual drug study?  Well, he concedes… a little of both.

So... I give him a piece of my Princeton mind.  Yes, I struggle for a little non-sexed respect in the sexed/sexist world of music, and reaching a certain age is like reassurance that you never again have to deal with the image-forward thing… unless you’re Dolly Parton, of course, or holding up the back-end of a cosmetically weighted contract.  I do find sublimating my long-honed sexuality in my writing and performance all the rejuvenation I require in this moment, and I’m not sure I want to spend my mature years pining and lusting and obsessing and inflicting the kind of psychic pain on my self and others for which I spent many years repenting.

Well, he offers… after a gynecological pause … how about your friends?

My friends? I’m going to furnish him with a pre-fabricated cast for his version of the over-50 Sex-in-the-City?  And what is he offering in return?  Vaginal rejuvenation?  I just met a Seventh-day Adventist in the subway, and even he had a better deal. He laughs.  Some women, he says, are willing to sacrifice for this.  You mean, I say… their first-born, and their second-born, etc…?  He laughs again.  Gives me his cell-phone, in case I change my mind.   I don’t change my mind, I retort.  Some nights I don’t even change my clothes. 

But am I supposed to hang up and think about this?  Like on the train last night…when some muscle-guy with demonic tattoos and a ripped vintage Metallica shirt leers at me?  Am I supposed to consider this?  My days of elevator encounters and one-night filmscripts definitely 'inform'  my private vocabulary, but I am still someone’s mother, and someone’s lover, and someone’s confidante--- even though they don’t need me in the desperate way they used to, nor I them.  I am just a little more attached to my self and my obsession to produce something artistically as worthwhile as a baby.  Maybe my heart is buried in my poetic head and my passion is in my fingers, but whatever bullet I want to load in my creative gun is not going to be over or under-the-counter or in my (or someone else’s) anatomical pants.    

Yeah.

Macy Blue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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