The Vanishing

 I've always been subject to a little claustrophobia. It could stem from a series of early childhood experiences locked in a closet but that's maybe too simple.  A couple of malfunctioning elevator episodes didn't help.  But the root of it feels deeper-- almost genetic. I've mentioned before that my father kept a packed suitcase in the closet at all times.  As for me, in the deepest, most tender sweet spot of a promising relationship... at the very crux of mutual intimacy, I get the urge to run.  It's a serious flaw; it's caused pain to others and I've paid a price. 

Analyzing, I used to pout as a teenager and warn prospective boyfriends not to wall me in with their expectations.  I even tried a psychiatrist who had the usual theories and a few more, but no cure. Of course, raising a child on my own, I easily laid aside my angst and put his priorities first.  But these days there's nothing I love more than the sense of a new day like a blank canvas-- no calendar, no appointments-- just a wide open time-field waiting for my footprint. It's a sense of security for me-- perhaps a small reassuring exercise in personal freedom.

Last night, at the close of a fairly non-scripted day, I watched a late-night film called The Vanishing-- the one from 1988, in Dutch, based on a book called The Golden Egg in which the heroine suffers from a recurring nightmare of claustrophobia.  In the film, she is part of a couple on a trip-- driving. They argue a bit; she vanishes at a gas station where she is abducted, unobserved, by a villainous character and never seen again.  Newspapers publicize her disappearance, her boyfriend spends years trying to figure it out.  But eventually the abductor begins to contact him.  He will reveal the mystery, he says, if the boyfriend agrees to the very same fate. The obsession for truth overcomes him and he agrees-- is chloroformed and wakes up in the dark where his lighter reveals he is in a coffin, buried alive.  Absolute horror.  Double horror.

For anyone prone to claustrophobia and film-empathy, this makes for a sleepless night.  Coupled with that, I learned of the death of a friend.  In grief, I cannot help but explore afterlife theories.  At least one member of the deceased's family is a devout Catholic and takes great comfort in the assurance of a heavenly transition. I, on the other hand, am not sure, have entertained all possibilities.  

My mother who was interred above my father in a double grave feared burial and begged me to have her cremated. My older sister thought otherwise.  Still, after six years, it haunts me.  Although we know logically the dead do not think or feel, I regret that I was outvoted and could not give her this simple last relief.  

In case we choose to ignore our age, the mailbox periodically reminds us with funeral options, cemetery real estate offers and hospice information. It's wearying and worrying... and while the ultimate choice remains to our heirs, I wish I could make some kind of peace with my ultimate destination.  I find funerals-- while comforting in a way, also appalling.  One of my friends was given a wake with a dramatic presentation in an open coffin. I kept hearing her implore me to tell people to fuck off and stop looking at her.  Some of them she openly disliked.  It was so unfair...  as though here is our final worldly act and we don't get the last word.  

My father the emotional claustrophobic had spent much time in the trenches during WWII.  In the end he lay in his simple coffin, draped with the American flag as a hero, and seemed to embrace his fate in the same manner. It was as though death had been a kind of relief to a life as a 'tough-guy' with its anxieties and unvoiced issues.  For us who have been raised with at least the illusion of free choice, the nightmare is being overruled-- told what to do-- held against our will or tied down or up.

I often wander through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum.  I must say, the custom of buryng the dead with their possessions-- with some space-- is appealing.  Not practical for us Americans here.  Even to name a fraction of a bench in Central Park for my Mom was impossible. They are taken... no waiting list for the dead... they are permanent.

Anyway, I will continue to struggle with my philosophies and ideals-- to weigh logic against belief, to pray for my friends, to deeply speak to God, to thank Jesus often, and nevertheless to wake up periodically in a nightmare of captivity, of immobility.  Imagination? We get up, walk around, open a window, breathe.  For now.

Snake Shack

It seems no matter what the state of the world, one can never avoid the New York City dog-days of August.  It's a kind of spell that descends on everything-- a unique bio-chemical atmospheric effect, the set-up of which requires 4 consecutive days of maximum heat and humidity with no noticeable cool-down.  The scent of everything wafts together like an old bad song-- damp animal fur, sweaty humans, car exhaust, fragrant foliage and most of all garbage-- food, organic dog-waste and that indescribable stench that reaches for you from the back of every urban sanitation truck in the universe. Couple that with the image that every inhabitant of the city exhaled all at once.  

Pandemic-empty trains are a thing of the past.  We are crammed in once again on platforms, in cars, absorbing way too much intimate physiological information about our fellow riders. Monkeypox-- other nightmarish summer threats, like shingles and vicious itchy rashes... normal insect bites are relatively benign if you're lucky enough to score an outdoor gig where you watch the little buggers feed on your playing arm. 

Some people leapfrog from air-conditioned room to room-- home to office, bars, restaurants, supermarkets, theaters.  I am still without this luxury... and while older age brings with it lower body temperatures, these days can be brain-cooking and challenging.  My laptop radiates heat like a small furnace, and I hesitate to open windows which let in no breeze but plenty of exhaust from my neighbors' window-units.  

Snake-weather, our young and beautiful live-in housekeeper from South Carolina called it.  Retha slept in a room down the hall from us where the only summer appliance in those 1950's days was a huge attic fan that blew air from the roof down a flight of stairs to nominally cool things off at night.  The sound of the crickets outside was like a symphony... the windows had to be thrown open to maximize circulation.  Before we went to sleep, Retha would recount tales of life in the South... mostly snake-lore.  It terrified me.  They come up the sides of the house, she explained-- wrap themselves around the pipes and slide along the eaves.... they even break the windows with their head-- the ones that have a blunt nose like a hammer.  But we had screens... I protested.  They turn themselves into spaghettis, she said... slips right through and comes together on the other side. Same with the shower-- they comes right through the holes-- they love the water.  Baths only for me.

I could smell the snakes at night... I could hear them slithering around in the flower-beds, coiling themselves around the garden-hose.  When the lights went out, I could see shadows in my sister's dust ruffles, moving.  After a particularly vivid tale one night I vomited.  There were serpents in my mythology books--- I stuck pages together so I wouldn't see... some of them had snake-hair or human heads. It was too much.  

I guess I was 3 or 4-- I'd broken my leg in some spectacular playground feat that failed... so I was less mobile.  My mother had the brilliant idea of taking me to the Bronx Zoo snake house... the hair of the dog?  Anyway, in my cast, I was wheeled around helplessly from cage to cage, from glass cube to cube with these monstrous slimy slidey creatures hissing and coiling and uncoiling like one of those slinky toys.  I remember the smell... it was August, like now. No air conditioning in those days... according to Retha, that's how the snakes liked it... hot and humid-- tropical.  There was one gigantic snake with this spectacular elaborate diamond pattern-- like argyll socks in pinks and blues... pressed up against its window... I puked up my cotton candy and whatever else.  Retha had to clean me up later. My mother was highly disappointed in me and the fact that her housewife psychology had backfired.  But the bedtime stories continued-- with that fascination kids have with horror tales... and the nightmares kept on.  I was chased, I was stalked... I was surrounded, fell in a pit of writhing legless bodies... they dropped from the skies like a Biblical plague.  I woke my sister, had to save her from the under-bed reptiles.  

Still, I never ratted on Retha.  I adored her... her cosmetic rituals and hair-braiding... her incomparable black skin.  We'd go to the store and men glared at her.  She was sexy, although I knew little of that then.  Eventually she was fired.  My mother told my sister she was pregnant... I had no idea what it meant, but with her plaid suitcase in hand, she put my hand on her bump and told me she'd swallowed a damn snake.  It seemed plausible.  

What other animal has those incredible patterns on their skin?  I mean-- there are zebras and leopards and tigers-- but the exotic pictures on reptiles?  For years I never really liked tattoos.  There's a famous anecdote about some old bluesman asking Mark Wenner of the Nighthawks why he done went and made a freak of himself.  Another remarked to me backstage how he can't figure why white people like to turn themselves into snakes.  I dated a guy with a snake tattooed on his arm and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.  In the end it was sort of a dealbreaker.  And a reminder, although my mother assured me there are no snakes in New York City, there are plenty, lol. 

Today I passed a huge glass cage that had been discarded on the sidewalk, close to the river.  It was big as a room, with decorative rocks...and kind of flat.  Obviously it had housed a snake... I wondered whether it had died of natural causes or slipped out in the dog days of summer to find some hot shade in which to coil or molt. Rats don't bother me-- mice, cockroaches... I'm a city girl.  But the image of a slithery stray moonbathing on the sewer grate gave me a hot shiver.

Retha promised to write even though I could barely read.  I guess she forgot, or as I later learned, our mother censored mail.  I wonder what her baby was like, and whether without her tales of swamp horror, whether I'd have tolerated reptiles the way I still don't.  I have an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be secretly married-- for decades. Not just a lying cheater but a cheating liar.  When I called him a snake, he had no idea of the depth of revulsion it conveyed.  I guess in these air-conditionless August nights, when we play back summer scenes from a life, when dog-day feverish sleep induces nightmares, the modern urban versions have at last replaced the ones from childhood.  Not sure which are worse.  Snake-days.