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Here is how it was.
I was afraid when I got to the retreat it would be mostly rich white people with rich white books about being rich and white. Or worse, rich white people with books about something more Glamorous. I was afraid we had been invited as part of the glamour.
But it was only half Rich and half Glam and so for all the rich folks I think we just read as different. It was like the way the city always paints the low-income housing hospital mint, lemon pie, and brink pink as if to say:
“We’ve done all we can to sterilize them.”
“What sweet thing are you making out of your fortuitous little hardship?”
and
“At least we’re demure here– on the precipice.”
The government says they’ll help you out with shelter but– if— “By the way, do you mind living in a petit four?” That way all the taxpayers can drive by and see the rainbow of their generosity, the spectacle of liberalism.
Thank you.
But these were the kinds of oblivious taxpayers who don’t understand the way their state-mandated donations humiliated the Glamourous Ones and so they didn’t really rub it in. Except, of course, in a couple of choice cases in which they brandished different sorrows in an attempt to bolster some mythic credibility. It was easy to tell them apart because the rest of us weren’t brandishing hardships. We were laughing out loud about missing teeth in a way that made them feel uncomfortable and then feeling sad and complicated about their sorrow.
Best and Worst:
It seemed almost foolish to start talking to the people who I would eventually talk to. Our latent friendship seemed such an embarrassing foregone conclusion that I was shy to begin. On the first night as a getting-to-know-you-game we were asked to find a partner and there were four or five I couldn’t have gone with because the facilitator had specified that we were to choose people we didn’t already know and they seemed too familiar. Of course they weren’t familiar and I didn’t know them. And: there wasn’t enough time to think like that.
Driving with G across the canyon from where we were staying I pointed to an enormous 1970s modern complex. “Wow,” I exclaimed with sincere curiosity, “what’s that?” We had been there four days already but it was only my second time away from the conference. She had been giving me a tour of the canyon and pointing out the really rich from the really really rich. With limited time I had decided to become an expert on Bel Air Knolls. For an hour I had pointed and she had obliged (that’s where Kathy Griffin lives, they’re cypress trees, yes– just like the movie.) “That?” she pointed, laughing, “that’s the University where we’re staying! In fact I think you can see ___ writing on the deck.” It was clearly him but I hadn’t been looking for him so I hadn’t recognized that hat and those legs. Soon it couldn’t have been anyone else.
“I saw a lizard!” ___ announced and later generously showed me a photograph of the reptile poised to run across the hot cement. “I got this one, too,” he said showing me a camera-phone image of the cement and the bushes from a greater distance. “If you know it’s there,” he said, “you can almost see the it.”
I wrote a note in cursive and it took him a moment to figure out what my letters were but he said the writing was pretty. Perhaps the worst thing to hear at a writing workshop.
Even when the moon was almost full
Even when the moon was full
Even when the crowd had thinned
Even under unforgiving institutional light
Even caught in headlights
Even as the rest of it turned into a restless, drunk din, and we perched distinct on the edge
Reading It Each All Other was still hard and dire.
And now I’m home and I’ve tried other outlets but it seems my only recourse is to write. Funny that that should have to be sufficient.
* A line from the entry “Angel” in Alistair McCartney’s encyclopedic novel The End of the World Book.
I’m running an hour a day already.
I don’t know what to say then. I would have suggested exercise. I suppose you could do it more.
Yeah.
What about swimming? I find that really helps me out.
Okay.
Baths. Meditation. It’s hard at first but it gets easier.
I think I’ve reached the bath daily limit.
Forget the earth. I don’t know who for.
These aren’t medical suggestions. The only medical suggestion is medication.
Hmmm.
I think you’re too fragile for that right now. These are just some things that work for me.
I don’t want to yell at her. I want to bring her red bean rolls and glow-in-the-dark plastic dinosaurs. Last week I hallucinated stand-alone radiators popping out of ever puddle of light in the periphery. I was sure that the drinking water was poisoned. I kept buying bottles of juice and then decided that the water in juice was bad, too. I would have to keep hydrated in other ways. Through osmosis. A fresh water mountain well. Where are the cacti of my home?
Colorado, I want to cut off your spiny top and drink from you.
Colorado, can I scurry along your desert ridge at night– undead, eyes yellowed?
It’s my year after all: Year of the Rat.
You wouldn’t know it: at this rate.
And not only that, I also felt love, emanating from a stuffed elephant. That’s right. I silently enumerate them on my fingers. 1) Hallucination. 2) Paranoia. 3) Love.
NC used to collect those little stuffed things. She thought they were so cute. I thought we might as well throw them away. Now I take them out, line them up, pet them. I would get rid of them but they’re loving me. It would break their batting hearts.
What is the cute threshold?
Is it fuzziness?
I don’t know. Is a tennis ball cute?
I think it’s eyes.
A tennis ball would be cute if it had eyes.
She talked to her friend in a cab on the way uptown. I was against the window in a a black skirt and boots.
What do you think? She asked me.
Oh I couldn’t hear you guys. By which I meant: you never explain yourselves to me and it’s so often a test.
Later someone asked me about that skirt. I bought it on one of our first dates when my zipper broke at Urban Outfitters.
Why didn’t you just ask for a safety pin or a staple?
What and idiotic question.
Three times in six weeks I have had fevers at night. Once for four days. Then a week. I’ll let you know when this one ends.
It’s too painful to lay still. I complain that my breath is burning my lips.
What will I do with all of this? I ask her.
Why are you so attached to going to graduation? Maybe you shouldn’t go.
It occurs to me that I only want to go so that I can walk around kicking over mothers’ purses into the wet grass, accidentally knock over brothers when I turn too quickly, step on men’s feet.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I have too much resentment to graduate.
At a party, a week ago, I descended the stairs in lead of 6 butch dykes to find tens of white college boys lined up along the stairs. I was in sage sequins, high heels, rage.
Wow. Look at all these pricks.
I announced only for their benefit.
There was a muttering.
Of/to other cretins: perhaps, since you feel so perfectly capable of seduction, I will seduce you. It will be just like Hard Candy except I Really Will cut them off. I will be your very last lesbian, honey.
Colorado, let me spill his into a stringy masses on the plains. Opaque– I hope. Something wet to look at over the meadows. Or perhaps I’ll just wipe my hand clean, unceremoniously on a row of library books. Castrato al dente.
Colorado, I miss you, baby.
Abrupt isn’t as queer as you think it is. Did it feel good for you too, baby? I think you did it for me. By that I mean, I’m getting accustomed to it, it hardly surprises me anymore and I don’t know if my sedation belongs to a history of abrupt or a history of mellowing abrupt down around the edges until it’s a row of soft, white, neat packages to line up– hide: Pack: expel.
In middle school I was voted (euphemistically? ironically? by dint of hanging chad?): Most Talented.
I’ve refined it now and realize I haven’t changed at all (popularity! irony! fraud!):
I award myself Most Denotative Use of Anal.
On election day, a coincidence, I polled you about what mythic/fantastic creature you would be in order to compensate for an assignment. The answers rolled in.
Nora: mermaid (she defends: no shell bra! majestic centaur of the sea!)
Sam: windigo (at least someone cops to carnivorous desires if not to blatant carnivorous tendencies)
Ken: not a centaur, centaurs are played out. A ___? Instead.
Femmephane: a centaur (no shell bra!). Fallback: vampire (my motivations clarified– camp)
Galen: “A goat creature? No. A Kraken. The Kraken is really metal.”
J: Cyclops
( F: No! Please, not a cyclops! I wouldn’t be with you!
J: I would be a big monster. I would make you!
JimmyHank: You wouldn’t be able to catch her without depth perception.)
In honor of elections (in allegiance to OneCountry) I elect Jimmy Hank: Most Talented.
* From Johnson, Barbara. “Nothing Fails Like Success,” A World of Difference. p 15.
-28. Somehow I think I failed to express my great sororal feelings in trackChanges. Red doesn’t suit me. But perhaps you’ll remember the bird below. A copy, perhaps. But ensconced in my covers nonetheless. (K)
-26. I should have remembered that my feet would start to hurt when the fever rose. I couldn’t get back to my bed alone. Thank you for coming to my rescue. My shrink will want to know as I often start sex stories with summaries of my feet. There Gone Bare Purpled. (O)
-24. I was thinking about you both in my bedroom at night. The elves and the shoemaker. (C/K)
-14. Between our visits I get tighter and tighter. Why. I Don’t Know. Well Please Figure It Out. My people, my only- dear- escape and I, Right? finish my thoughts with you. It’s always a surprise when I feel comfortable enough to take off my wet boots, put my bag out of reach, sit down as if I might not have to run. And for two whole, shuddering, hours I don’t. (T)
-8. We made Orphan promises and I meant mine in the most optimistic way. I do want you to have everything and was naive when you weren’t about the past and how to make the future. It’s not like I’m still looking for shoes small enough to fit you anymore. (NC)
Illustrations:
bird whistle. for best results, submerge.
my brother. redheaded and still unashamed of his grin. water-damaged.
my father, younger. his mother, left, with IV.
first generation. Coney Island
d. I dreamt you sent me a card with red flowers that said: “Instead of Montreal, come to my show a week from Thursday.” The letters were large and gray, more circular than yours. Maybe your mother wrote it, I guessed but knew it couldn’t true. When I woke up I thought it might have been an old invitation, meant for someone else. You never work on Thursdays. I reviewed my unsent emails and realized I should have delivered them in red bows.
b. I was relieved to find that your captioned stills terrify me.
k. Over and over you coo “hellooo” into my voicemail as if I can hear you leaving the message. When I return the calls it’s too noisy to hear you and as soon as you pick up I lose my voice against the train anyway.
o. I part and fall into two cold blocks. I am proof of how neatly soft water can be sliced. I wished it had been different last night.
a. I weaken in four places and accordion dramatically when I’m with you. Finding the floor with my hands I tell you, again, the story about how I asked my mother How many years you get for adultery. She told me No Years because It Isn’t Illegal and I realized how much simpler my life would be. I was eight. After that I smeared my makeup and poured a whiskey for you.
b. We talked about the faces we wear in the world and who would roll the heater in. You sauteed the garlic and I poured the gin heavy with my socks pulled up high over my running tights. It was only ten but we acted like we had been talking all night.
1. Wrangling a Pigeon with Aplomb
2. Foreground: some bread I baked in nick of time. Baked provolone with herbs and provolone. Dispersed: Ashley’s wine specially selected to complement the menu.
3. Split-pea salad with roasted carrots and beets. Recipe to follow.
4. Ken and Ashley want to meet a hipster and I phone a friend. Ken strikes commemorative pose.
5. Apples to Apples begs questions: can four beers stand in for shuffling cards?
6. At long last Ashley and I shuffle our feet in the same room.
My (real) applications are done and I’m all foldering and dust now. More later. More soon.
(For now) the tools at my disposal: camera phone, inks, sewing machine, new bread recipe-sink or swim, whistling.
The best thing about my doctor is that she doesn’t want to stop the auras. “We can treat the headaches without getting rid of them now,” she assures me using now as opposed to before. “I’ve heard that you know a lot more about vascular headaches now than you did when I was diagnosed.” We have. We have. I don’t have the heart to tell her that my peripheral experiences are not limited to auras. I don’t have the heart to tell her that it might be another psychosis.
And then there’s the matter of hearing things:
You’re saying things to me and I’m not listening because they don’t sound like themselves. They sound like other phenomena, thinly disguised as words. As a patient I wonder if I should report or suppress them. As a writer I wonder if I could catalog the encoded phrases for later use in evoking scenes with purest linguistic sleight of hand.
I love you (January, despite a distance): Something felty born into the corner and coming forward to watch us lie still afterwards, licked by a rough tongue but motherless.
..last song I played for my mother (November, unexpectedly): Wooden chair legs scraping against a wooden floor until the back hits a soft white wall. (And I began to cry.)
She thinks calling you [xxx] is too intimate (November/October, causing the collapse of months): Grapes deserted and sandy wherever they’ve broken.
Meanwhile other scenes go on. In other halls “apricot” still means “kissed by the sun” and “mercy…” What does mercy mean, again?
It’s been weeks and, believe me, I’ve barely stopped to tie my boot.
Time passes and passes and “[the] infernal beings in those lands are constantly subject to inauspicious colouring, poor metabolism, ugly bodies, horrible experiences and awful shapes, all of which multiply their miseries.”
I have become flooded and unrecognizable. The extant recognition now being programmatically nipped in bud by strangers and siblings.
My nicknames are being slowly encroached upon by people who are mad at me, by people who aren’t mad at me but have other things at stake. And new nicknames are cropping up from unapproved sources or for unapproved reasons.
That and– I’ve spent 9 days now, emailing the dean every single day, trying to get a grade moved from someone else’s transcript onto mine. How fitting that they would put my grade for an independent study on freakishness, monstrosity, and memoir onto someone else’s transcript. After five years of work with the same administrators day after day, they cannot remember my name, cannot remember I need their help to fix the mistake, and consequently cannot help but prevent me from involving myself in the next officious University. So much for confessing in service to something hegemonically corrupt but specially efficient.
I repeat myself over and over. I am periodically acknowledged– which is even more confusing. I feel like I’m trying to shout to people on the beach with my head well underwater.
This has been a shudder and leak-filled week. Yesterday, while diligently at work on my midterm papers, I periodically fell into dampness, tears pouring down my cheeks. There was no sobbing, just a little too much straightforward moisture for a cafe.
Last week I dreamt of a lesion 3 inches in diameter below my right breast. It was 1 inch raised, soft and discolored like an elephantine burn. I thought it was a grave illness but then my mother said there was piece of glass in my side. Of course! A piece of glass! An infection. She removed the triangular shard with her fingers like she would a splinter and the fluid drained onto my clothing. I sopped it up and she closed the wound with safety pins.
Forgive the water from my side.
As illustration I offer the uncannily apt: 
(mbc in very large chair, reflected. San Diego.)
Condition: Fake Allergies (Type I) see also “Food Allergies as a Lifestyle Choice”
- Most common faux allergies: Gluten, soy, wheat, refined sugars, nuts, dairy, alcohol, pesticides.
- Symptoms: Reported but rarely seen symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraine, stomach cramps, gas. Sufferers may complain of specific food-related anguishes that mysteriously disappear or become less severe when the sufferer is confronted with a version of the supposedly noxious food that they really, really like. Sufferers hijack dinner plans, complain loudly and/or divert conversation to topic of their limited lifestyle, and can miraculously discover the allergy is over if they accidentally consume the food. They are also well known for using the phrase “I can eat a little bit of it.”
- Causes: Telling waitstaff to hold the offending product because “[you're] allergic” so many times that now you think it’s true. Heavily interpolated interest in a specific and discredited fad diets of the 1990s. Obsession with weight. Fussiness, middle-child-syndrome, center-of-attention-complex, desire to be quirky. Residual attachment to environmental illness and word “toxins” combined with awareness of stigmatization.
- Correlations: Requires a certain amount of access to Three P’s (Power, Privilege, and Gourmet Natural Foods) and willingness to talk about oneself. Oft-encountered in supporters of the Yoga Industrial Complex.
- Treatment: See Lysistrata— don’t sleep with them, they’ll never learn
Famously Fake Allergic: Madonna, Yoko Ono, Pontius Pilate (unconfirmed.)
Condition: Hysterically-inflected Faux Allergies (Type II)
- Symptoms: Psychosomatic symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraines, sore throat, shock, hyperventilation, bruising, and heart palpitations. Sufferers believe it so hard it becomes true. They are quieter about their faux-allergies and pine for the days when they didn’t break into hives when they ate certain things.
- Causes: Admirably complex psychopathology. Nervousness. Anxiety-disorders.
- Correlations: Strong imagination. Contested correlation: A Womb.
- Treatment: Because they cause real symptoms, you should avoid the foods you are hysterically-inflected faux allergic to. Go to therapy. Try not to get upset when people with Fake Allergies (Type I) give you their advice which will probably include suggestions to meditate and participate in the Yoga Industrial Complex. Don’t engage them in conversations about the colonization of Buddhism and Hinduism by New Agers.
Famous Hysterics: Dora, Ms. EM, Emily Dickinson.
Condition: Feline-Intruder-Related “Fake” Cat-Allergy (Type II.b)
- Prognosis: trouble in paradise.
- Symptoms: Skin problems, sinus problems, sore throat, watery eyes, discomfort, headaches.
- Causes: Justified hatred of cats. General interest in keeping a clean/dust&hair free household, commitment to staying independent of the house, distaste for Litterbox.
- Correlations: Otherwise good character, preference for dogs or petlessness, reticence to talk about allergy with lesbi-friends.
- Treatment: OTC medications can mitigate effects of FIR allergies although there is no real cure. Also, Benadryl can’t outsmart your hysteria and so you can’t hope for a normal life unless you live in a cat-free environment.
2. Cause: Sleepwalking. You go out the front door and stand in the snow. Someone comes to get you and they learn to lock up at night. Treatment: Restraint.
4. Cause: Wide-eyes. In 13 years you will forget why it started happening– but remember all the same wresting energies. Although it is smarter than to be fooled by common remedies: hot baths, keeping the bed a sleeping place, Valerian, relaxation techniques– it can be treated with more innovative methods until it adapts. Discover by trial and grave, grave, error. Treatment: Hypothermia. Close the door and open all the windows in the middle of the winter. It is well below zero and somehow your little room is cold enough to pour drafts down two floors and across the house. Your father comes in to say, “What are you doing? There’s a three-foot snow drift on your bed,” and you later regret not opening your eyes to see the snow for yourself and always wonder about the texture of snow blown through a screen. In the summer sing in a loud whisper to yourself and enjoy the sound of your own, out-of-tune voice.
1. Cause: Heat. Your first summer in Massachusetts you stay in a brick box on the fifth floor with no window or fan. Every hour or so you wake up gasping for air and wonder if anyone’s ever reported suffocation by heat. Death isn’t scary enough yet so you can go back to sleep with ease just by looking at the chapel tower and finally being alone. Treatment: Company. Sleep on an extra-long twin bed with someone else instead. Preferably a bunk-bed so that there are three of you in close quarters. His roommates will get used to seeing you naked when he goes to class in the morning. Stay awake all night fucking and walking around and only go inside to check in for curfews. If you have to be alone, be sure to have sex all afternoon and then sleep in public next to other teenagers who are smoking all night on the bridge over Mass Ave.
4. Cause: (pre)Occupation. Night jobs. Treatment: Don’t sleep. The insomnia will treat itself and you will find yourself, always, miraculously tired. It will be the biggest relief of your life.
5. Cause: Worry. Fret yourself hard until you are cross-hatched with fraught. You know you’re doing it right when you can hear every movement of your gurgling stomach– or, at least, you will know that your stomach is gurglingly in motion. Treatment: Divide all your food into rations and write up lists detailing the exact amount of food you can filch from roommates. Figure out how many days you have to skip the subway in order to afford something besides rice and rice. Plan to steal vitamins in the meantime. Think about how sleeping is the mature solution to hunger and calculate how much you can save just by spending more time unconscious then solve all your problems by doing the responsible thing.
7. Cause: Disturbance. Life is elsewhere and your dreams are equally terrifying. Keep all your options open to safeguard against terrors. You’re having recurring dreams about inanimate objects that swell and threaten and then chase you. They’re things without legs or wheels and most of the dream is caught up with being afraid that they are about to come after you. You run through a maze and shoot the thing to bits until a whole field is covered in the parts. They wobble and explode into growth and come at you in droves. One night it’s the button-eye of a doll and the next, two glass blobs stacked up like 2/3 of a snowman. You tell your shrink but there’s only so much you can do about being obvious. “In the dream, where are you?” “Inside the castle walls, and I know that if I only get out– but I’ve also done the dream before so I know how it ends.” Treatment: Cultivate obscure information fetishes. Look up the lengths of books and fact-check rumors. Image-search film stars of the 1930s and lesbian pulp. Compile lengthy documents and plan very long jokes that rely on the convergence of a high number of unlikely factors. Fine-tune your punchlines so they’re ready when the chance arises.
3. Night Sweats. Arise late in the month and catch you by surprise. After two years of fucking him, it’s over and every cleft is full of residue, skin smudged. You feel it first at the corners of your mouth moist with sweat and spit that somehow can’t be wiped away because you haven’t any clean sleeves and it’s too hot in the basement to launder. It is the first time you know you will leave someone you loved and it makes you briefly euphoric to be hale enough to choose to be unloved. You wait for September to take a clean shower and know he will go on loving you after you’re gone.
4. Inflammation. Avoids the joints which loosen instead, affects the abdomen and back. First, you will notice a taut line cinching your waist and displacing your bowels into your chest. You might think you have been lassoed but the infection is internal. You will find out where she and her girlfriend are going so that you can drop by. You will practice casual conversations in order to be capable of them. When everyone else strips down and jumps into the pond, you will avoid each others’ naked bodies because you are both horrified by the tightening line that bisects you into two bruised parts: sex and sex.
5. Delusion. A peripatetic flutters darkly onto the periphery and you chase the black coat and fables into a long walk. A month from now, at the end of the night after four false goodbyes and a pie she couldn’t eat, you will kiss her cheek over her bicycle still a mile from your home. But in July you won’t know that and will only write notes into the ether and wonder how mad and madder who is. You are.
6. Disorientation. When the train stops, you no longer understand where you are. There are only two verbs, to rush and to loom. Because you are a fugitive you try to look casually at all the subway maps and wonder why no one lists the city or, even, state. That kind of information would certainly help you figure out how to behave next. Your lover attends to you but you have deserted your body so she tends to someone else while you watch and get jealous. In a lucid moment, you have a bagel picnic in the park on the river and all but forget it until a year later.
7. Shock. Your tongue swells up and the walls of your throat kiss each other, perilously. You gasp for air and chew on the inside of your mouth, probing and measuring. It’s worst after you eat, especially fruit or drugs or the sound of going-right-to-voicemail. You carry your id everywhere and walk around the 24 grocery store for hours so that someone can call 911. Finally you are diagnosed with something vague and you are told to take two pills before bed. They make you flush and clamor to the top of your body– trying to scratch and tread back to the surface, sure you will die if you can’t vomit. It is the first time you have ever drowned in yourself and it’s the only cure anyone can come up with. You take higher and higher dosages to shorten this fit before sleep but it always requires a little lapse in life for you to fall. Every night you are sure you will die as soon as you stop trying to breath and every night you have to go to bed anyway. Soon you discover that it’s not the sedation that the doctors think will help but the expected inurement to mortal fear.
