Hunters and Collectors

Like most writers, or maybe preachers… there's a running sort of monologue in my head… I walk, I ride subways… and this undervoice, this commentary… usurps my ear, and occasionally escapes in a snide remark that I swear I am not responsible for… my 'writerless' companion, my simultaneously better and evil twin.  I am a collector-- of voices, of snapshots I will never take-- and she is the critic, the mouth--even when I look down at the sidewalk, she reminds me, she spooks and taunts me…

I still pick up change… tiny treasures on the street intrigue me-- someone else's accident that intersects with my random existence-- the cosmic coincidence thing.  Something I've noticed: people in Harlem don't pick up coins.  Like that woman on the train that brushed herself off when she realized some silver had leaked out… and yet, these Fifth Ave. eccentrics in my hood-- with doormen and drivers--- they will stoop for a dime….maybe not a penny, but a dime.  That's their boundary.  Me?  I'll investigate a worthless earring, an old book, a penny.

For some reason on my walk today I thought about the story of some artist in Chicago-- a Henry Darger type--- or maybe it actually was Henry himself who was a hoarder of great renown, and the quintessential undiscovered artist.  Anyway, he saved up bits of string, and wound them into a ball which eventually, like some Magritte fantasy, dwarfed everything else in the room, made it impossible to enter or leave-- essentially 'ate' his world.

Henry died of stomach cancer; among the thousands of items in his apartment-- including the incredible, magical artwork and writings--  were hundreds of empty Pepto Bismol bottles.  He was a collector.  Most artists, I have noticed, are collectors.  We find treasures where others do not; we create art out of people's leftovers and leavings.  We see heaven in an empty bottle, Jesus in a synchronicitous song lyric, relief and comfort in an old poem.  For some of us, there are levels of discretion-- a bit of filtering that maybe true geniuses like Henry lacked.

On the other side of the field there are those who give things up-- those for whom loss is simply a non-notable occurrence--- like a meal.  In fact, these people probably couldn't tell you what they had for lunch.  I admire their lack of sentimentality-- their efficiency.  They are like a cup with a hole--- everything passes through, they acquire and delete in equal measure, they do not mourn or notice the things that keep me awake nights.  They try not to feel; some of them are extremely successful and clever.  Maybe they have figured out how loss is the end product of this life, in a way, and have learned how to manage this.  Waste management.  They are like dogs, in a way.  They wag their tale when they are being acknowledged, but they don't worry about their death-- or yours.

So I am a collector-- an intellectual hoarder, in a way.  I am obsessed with people like Henry Darger who died in abject hoarder-poverty while art collectors today fight over his fragile artwork, because he had the passion and imagination to create a bizarre and unique world in which he apparently 'fit'.  I pick up coins because I am intrigued by the cycle of life and possessions and the fact that maybe my dead ex-boyfriend might have once held this 1959 penny and used it to buy cigarettes he smoked in bed with me while we laughed and lived in our series of strange tableaus which have become now like an old photo-album that never existed but I am able to browse without technology at any moment.  These thoughts inform my life and my beliefs.

Last week I was offered a job.  Not a gig or a session, or even a writing assignment-- but a curatorial job, from the old life for which I was highly trained.  This corporate collector-- with maybe a billion dollar stockade of contemporary art--- had decided in a crisis that nothing he acquired over the last twenty years had any value for him.  He had decided to turn back the clock and sense his art the way he used to, when paintings were important, and not valued as investment-- when he used my guidance to buy younger under-acknowledged artists (like Henry Darger, at the beginning).  Of course I refused--- me, the starving musician/poet, the poster child for under-consumption, the author of the virtual and incredible guide to NYC on $4 a day.

So the guy calls me back, asks me to meet him for dinner, which I turn down, because I am so inappropriately clothed for the kind of places he frequents.  A coffee, maybe, I agree to-- -and he wants to come to my apartment next-- to see my 'stuff'… and he is now offering me what any normal person could not refuse-- I could fix my teeth, and buy a new apartment with this kind of money.  The job description: to sort through and find the true gems, to disperse the hundreds of useless overvalued works of art, to start clean with a Disneyland budget and buy whatever I valued.  And for all the women I ever advise-- if you want a guy to fall in love with you, just ignore him-- he'll go nuts if he's a narcissistic egomaniac-- the guy is now laying out offers of seven figures…. and I swear, it not only doesn't tempt me--- it makes me kind of sick.  I am terrible at Waste Management, I explain…. and the very reason I am a commodity for him is also the explanation for why I can never do this.

Okay.  I admit it was a little flattering.  It was a little tiny bit affirmative and really who can I confide in except my writerless companion who was making all kinds of obscene dissing remarks about the guy none of which made it past my throat, but maybe made the vision of that cash a little more suffocating.  Having to walk into galleries and watching the calculating Directors of Art Madness suck up to me in my used jeans.  Having a kind of power.  Having desperate artists with eviction notices beg me… but most of all, the fear of losing my voice, of losing my Dargeresque ambition.  Having been baptized into the religion of poverty-- and it is a kind of religion-- it requires faith and strength and compassion and charity and resistance… I just couldn't sell out.  Not for sushi, not for my teeth, not for whatever  costume or bejeweled truffle soup the art world has become.  I can look, I can think and feel and listen and collect what wanders irresistibly into my world where I am King and slave and secretary and CEO and have just enough discipline to know when my emotional ball of string is beginning to block the view.  Amen.

Offside

Athletes are lucky.  They train and they practice, but when it comes to the game--- there are referees, there are coaches;  you're not responsible for bad decisions; your coach is.  But when you make the touchdown, it is yours.  And your attitude--- like that guy Sherman who finished off the interception-- and saved the game for his team, just like that--- he had to throw it in the face of his opponent, who was in the exact opposite position of having lost all for his team.  All or nothing.  But the referees-- the announcers-- the analysts--  you are praised or penalized for sportsmanship, the way no one does this in our lives.  They are lucky, these guys.  They know if they have won or lost.  And they get paid, whichever side they are on.  For the players, all bets are on.

My friend's wife has an eating disorder.  I have tried and tried to figure out her thinking.  I have thought--if we could only vomit up the bad years… and leave the good.  And there is so much regurgitated time… so many of us back it endlessly through some kind of wringer--exploit it, publicize it-- until all the truth has been squeezed out.  Or these girls…with their eating disorders… maybe it is the excess… we all get too much of what we don't need and not enough of what we do.  We are stuffed and starving.  Personally I'm not sure what I need.  I'm so obsessed with proving why I don't need anything these days, I've become a reverse-hoarder-- an emotional minimalist.

My older sister still has her 40-year-old wedding gifts in boxes (both weddings, actually, even though one is unmentionable).  What is the meaning of this-- that she can hoard fresh new love away until she needs it?  That it will stay wrapped in the box?  When we were small, she stashed hundreds of packs of M&Ms under her mattress… every single day I shared mine--- and when I saw the layers and layers--- it was astonishing.  Like a bank-heist.  I wonder what happened to all of them-- all the things we don't need-- in a massive pile, all our old memories sewn into a football-field-sized patchwork quilt.

I've figured out what bothers me about that woman Martha… the Roman Catholic kleptomaniac bag lady.  Maybe like a distorted mirror in a Flemish Painting, she is the hideous image of what I can become if I keep on this path of fierce independence, of refusing to 'need' things.  They say kleptomaniacs don't really need what they take (not so for thieves).  She can't possibly need all those paper towels unless she is burning them for fuel.  The grocer maybe just lets her get away with her petty pilferings of biscuit rolls and tinned meat.  Take them… go ahead.  If I was the check-out girl
I would look her straight in the eye,  I would look at her with the eyes of a judge.

But tonight I watched her from behind a locker door, stuffing things in bags…bags for socks, for sneakers… for the stolen toilet tissue and kleenex and paper towels…for the hand towels…. for the bags she tears off rolls, the super-sized lotion dispensers she somehow makes off with...  bags of bags of bags.  I watch her with disdain and antipathy that shames me.  It's Sunday;  I'm not supposed to have uncharitable thoughts.  Today my unequivocal attitude seemed to nearly dare her to speak to me.  I would have replied I was in a non-verbal mood.  The Patriots had lost, after all (I hate the Patriots); and she would surely have walked over and in the most time-consuming way possible explained how she doesn't care about sports, and I would have had to say 'who's speaking of sports?' and she would have had to think about the Fathers of our Country, etc.

What possible reason does this woman have for belonging to a gym?  Because nowhere else will allow her daily access from morning until night including facilities and showers and opportunities for human conversation?  For her it is a sort of group home?  Why is everyone else able to ignore her?

There is a young guitar player that likes me. He claims he can see my soul and he tells me that he loves me.  I feel pain when I think about him--- the kind of pain I associate with love…but I can't oblige him because I know one day he'll look at me and see Martha.  Her hair is the color of an elephant, and her skin is like an old shoe.  Maybe I am the only one who sees her--- like a reverse Wim Wenders angel, she hovers-- my own personal gargoyle-- and a bleakly terrifying version of my own future.

But I want the Wim Wenders version of angel.  I want him to have the beautiful liquid eyes of Bruno Ganz and the intelligence of a philosopher.  I want him to understand me without words, the way the guitar player does not.  And I want the future-mirror to reflect a gracefully aging woman who still writes poetry and plays cello with finesse. I want a personal referee to tell me it's okay I haven't won, and that my bandmate's behavior was abominable and not that I am necessarily right, but that I am not wrong, and Martha is not my problem, and it is okay that she steals from other's lockers because she needs these things, or maybe because she doesn't need these things.  And despite the existence of extreme greed and extreme want in this world, there are hoarders of gold and hoarders of garbage, the over-fed and the starving---  we are all consuming time in precise unison-- no more, no less-- and the four quarters of our 'game' will be scoreless or filled with touchdowns, wins, losses, injury, bench time, disputes and joy.

Many years ago I bought a Seahawks pillowcase for my son who loved sports.  He was about 7, and he looked at me like I was some kind of moron.  So it was only 99 cents, and I liked the color---what did I know about football?  I looked for it in the back of the closet tonight.  He's all grown up and is now a Seattle fan….and is lucky enough to be going to the actual Superbowl game.  So maybe I'll leave it in my locker tomorrow for Martha.

Ship Song, 2013

Message 3 on my voicemail today informed me that an email was sent without the anticipated 'attachment'.  Sometimes I imagine if I had a business card, it would say ‘Ironist’.  But on Sundays I try to live my life spontaneously, to unravel each moment without a pre-conceived agenda.  So the ‘lack of attachment’ comment had extra resonance.  The thing is, I am over-attached.  I have too many friends—not the facebook kind-- the kind that call you first to say  I-just-fucked-my ex-husband or my-biopsy-came-back abnormal.   Or some nights it’s I’m really down, or I took too many vicodin and I’m drinking, or I’m losing my hearing.  Seriously.  I can’t hear out of my left ear.  

And I listen.  Sometimes it requires humor, a philosophical discussion of whether we’d prefer blindness or deafness, ad absurdum.  Sometimes it’s exchanging heartwreck, disarming the potential emotional murderer, elaborating the downside of suicide, alternating between Plato’s wisdom and Rihanna’s.  The thing is, I love my friends.  Most of them.  I love the ladies who confess things to me at the gym (some of them) and my upstairs neighbor’s old photographs.  I look, I listen, I deliberate, I care.  I feel sad and I miss people. It hurts when they move away, when they are miserable, when they smash their guitar or their car, when their daughters are using, when their Moms die, when they say things that no one else says. 

I have learned to let them come and go--- not to hold them in a room or expect them to remember my birthday (well…. most of them).  When I feel love is not passionate and exclusive I leave.  I try to time-defuse my own emotional emergencies and besides, no one leaves their phone on at night except my crazy love-obsessed kids.  I can pour my aching bloody heart into an email and know it will be read with a Starbucks on an iphone, not unfolded and handled by candlelight in a dark room, in solitude.  The soundtrack could be that annoying ‘Fun’ or some soppy Josh Groban or whiny Rufus Wainwright or Call me Mr. Flintstone I can make your bed rock  with a Nicki-Minaj-sized butt in front of him on line. Out of my control.  Like all my ‘attachments’.

The fact is, I seemed always to be the person in the room who got selected, the one psychos stopped in the street for directions, for money, for solace or company… for an ear, a hotdog…  It is genetic, this thing.  My Mom had all kinds of annoying ‘friends’ in the supermarket, on the block, at the gas station.  But she seemed to be able to turn and shrug pretty consistently.  Her bills were paid, she had no clue how to qualify for a mortgage or what social security really was.  I, on the other hand, feel a sort of hole whenever one of my friends hangs up or walks away.  It’s a hole that eventually fills in, but it’s a hole.  I miss things.  I miss things I did, nights I laughed and nights I cried.  I miss feeling like I wouldn’t trade anything with anyone, I miss really loud guitars and Marshall stacks without worrying about my poor distressed ears, I miss throwing off my clothes and jumping into a fountain at night, standing up in a convertible at 70 mph, running barefoot, the feeling of zipless sex in an elevator. 

My friend who was a bona-fide rockstar was robbed in December.  Some cheap thugs broke in and took her stuff.  Of course there’s insurance, but they took her maybe worthless old non-vintage 1990’s synthesizer and she misses it.  Her whole song catalogue belonged to this thing, and it hurts like a lost dog.  Why can’t people understand these things?  When I tell my kids to ‘let it go’ I know how much I miss that first kick of the baby inside you, and my own ultra-internalized drama-queen teenage sickness.  So is it the insecurity of the lifestyle I’ve chosen? The fact that I never know for certain whether we’ll make the monthly insurance payment, the maintenance… that things can disappear so easily, they seem not transient and cheap but more valuable?

My son is texting, listening to Nas, ordering a slice, checking his calendar--- connecting, literally… but I am the one standing still with ten thousand strings and wires.  Worrying, missing. 

And on the other hand, I wander unstirred by art galleries, thumb unmoved through new novels, yawn at the fashion-week runway shows, and find the only nudity really upsetting is that of the Emperor.  The Grammies were musical Girl Scout cookies.  Even the shenanigans and spectacles feel silly, overdressed.  Jack White looked stupid and pasty and I wonder if he is missing the first White Stripes gig when his wife or sister or ex-girlfriend or whatever she was looked fat and awkward and nervous. 

Adele is not even fat, Justin Timberlake looked like a dumb Ken-doll version of himself, and maybe it is my shitty TV or my tinnitus, but everyone sounds shrill and thin and pageanty.  There is television-- -the shows, the news, the new generation Law and Orders-- scripted reality, and unscripted unreality.    Everything has a soundtrack; every song has a video, a visual, a red-carpet-worthy costume….isn’t the music alone ever enough?

Maybe I am just old.  I remember my Mom, my guest onstage at some massive 1970’s rockstar concert, asking one of the band members ‘Don’t you boys know any songs?’

Still, I go to the gym and I listen to stories; I tell my own and sometimes I scarcely recognize these people who have told me intimate things they haven’t even told their shrink.  Or other times, I go home and cry for them and write a song they will never hear.  My catalogue--- the endless unalphabetized people who have touched me, and still touch me, and wreck me, and make my life nearly unmanageable like a hoarder.  Rich men amass money… and they spend it; we emotional harvesters absorb moments and spend them carelessly.  I’ve always had this fascination/fear of the sea.  Not like a surfer, but like a stranded Robert Louis Stevenson character.  Since the hurricane, I’ve listened with great interest to the victims that cannot tear themselves from their ruined houses, from future peril, because their attachment to the sea is ironically related to the threat.  After all, we are chronically attached, terminally connected, some of us standing alone on some familiar shore feeling all the ships of our lives recede into some emotional horizon where our past and future endlessly flirt but never meet.  Few of their passengers ever think to turn around to wave, and if they do, we’re much too far to see.