Etrange Histoire

I rented this room for a month in Philly. I had no job and I gave the landlord, who was also my roommate, the last of my money for rent. I had broken up with my boyfriend a few months before and left New York, but didn’t really know what I was doing in Philly. I just figured I needed to move, and that was where I ended up. I walked around the city, it was January and so cold, but I had no money for bus fare. I thought I was pretty and could get a job as a waitress somewhere, anything really, because I was so hungry and if I didn’t get some money soon I wouldn’t have a place to live either. It was so gray every day, but it never snowed. It was freezing though, and when I would come back to my room I would have to pile all my clothes on top of me at night because I was so cold and the house was this old Victorian thing in University City and had no insulation. It was so big and cold, it would’ve made a great studio, but at the moment I had no art supplies and could think of nothing but getting a job and food. I walked so much. Sometimes when I got home really late at night and all my roommates were sleeping, I would sneak into the kitchen and eat tiny bits of their leftovers so that no one would ever know that anything was gone. Then my grandmother called one day and sensed some kind of desperation in me, even though I never said anything about the fact that I was hungry. She said she wanted to send me some money, and she did. When I got the money I went to the tiny Vietnamese restaurant down the street and ordered grilled pork and bun (white noodles) and it was the best tasting food I had ever eaten. Then I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a space heater. I was tired of having a runny nose all night. I took the train, which took an hour, and then lugged the big ass heater all the way back. That took me 4 or 5 hours, because I missed my stop and had to get off the train and walk.

My mom called a couple days after that and told me that she had breast cancer. I decided to sell all my things so I could buy a plane ticket to St. Petersburg, FL to be with her. I had been seeing this guy from Mexico, he was a film student in New York and then he moved to London to go to the film academy there. I wanted to see him before I went to FL, so he bought me a plane ticket to London and then I flew to FL from there. I sold my library for $50. I put half the books in my suitcase and wheeled them over to the store, and then came back for the other half. It took me 6 hours because the store was far away and I didn’t have cab fare and no car either. There were thousands of dollars of books in that suitcase that I had been collecting for years. I remember the next day I walked by the book store and they had put my hardback copy of The Davinci Code in the window for $14.95. I was livid.

When I got to London I had been drinking during the flight so my jet lag was magnified. While everyone else was eating breakfast I was drinking red wine. I got off the plane and felt like I was floating through the airport. It was so pleasant. I didn’t have a cell phone and neither did F., so I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to find him. He was on a flight from Mexico that day too so we were rendez-vousing at Heathrow. I found him and we went into the city and got a hotel room. I hadn’t seen him in a month and I was so happy to be next to him. He had money so we went to dinner at this Lebanese restaurant. It was so beautiful. There was red velvet everywhere and candles and gilded things and darkness. The waitress was gorgeous, with long black hair and black eyes that had little specks of light in them. We ordered so much food, and it all came to the table on these little golden metal plates. Olives and tapenades and spreads and this amazing bread, and then a lamb dish and some curries that were so unusual. And lots of red wine.

I didn’t even think about Philly. It had been a failure from the beginning, but I memorized every part of the city because during the three weeks that I lived there, I walked from one end to the next numerous times.

F. and I did the same thing in London, just walking all around and watching as the neighborhoods changed from gritty to exciting to upscale to market-place to Chinatown. We ate at this Chinese restaurant one night and walked by this tiny casino, and I remember that the last time I was in London with my ex we had played some games at that casino. It was like I couldn’t escape him. I even left the country and I still saw things that reminded me of him everywhere! Oh well, I was starting to forget about him nonetheless. After dinner at the Chinese restaurant we went to this bar and got really drunk. The music was loud and there was this big bunch of balloons in the corner. I got so drunk that at one point I grabbed the whole bunch of balloons and started handing them out to everyone. They were all laughing and thought I was so weird. F. saw a guy flirting with me and grabbed me by the arm to take me home. I took that whole bunch of balloons with me and no one said anything. The bouncer made fun of me because I’m American. I told him to piss off.

London is always really gray and rainy too, so I felt at home there. When you order coffee they ask you “In or on the road?” The pubs are packed at noon. People smoke a lot. The red buses are funny, they look like toys. So do the cars. There are a lot of really beautiful stone buildings. We went to the British Museum. It’s so austere. Trafalgar Square is so beautiful too, and all of London is just enchanting with its history and architecture. And the Thames snakes through so if you walk all around you get to see it a couple times and even cross it over the Castle Bridge which is a blue and white castle, and the London Bridge and then this really cool footbridge that’s brand new. Only people are allowed on it.

And then when I left I was sad but at the same time a little excited because I was going to Florida to see my family and I like moving to new places, so I was looking forward to leaving dreary London to emerge in sunny Florida. And I really like palm trees.

F. had got me the cheapest flight he could possibly find so I had two layovers. One of them was in Toronto and it was overnight, but I had no money for a hotel so I sat in the airport and just tried to sleep. The unfortunate thing was that the seats had arm rests, so I couldn’t lay down. I tried a couple different positions but I just couldn’t sleep like that. So I went to the bathroom to wash my face because I felt gritty. When I walked through the door there was a wooden bench just inside the door of the bathroom. I laid on it and slept with my backpack as a pillow. A lady came in at like 7 am and gasped, which woke me up, but I just smiled at her and went out to see if the line was open for my flight. I had left F. at Paddington Station about 18 hours before that. I was starting to feel delirious. When I walked out there was NO ONE in the airport and I was confused. My flight was supposed to leave at 9:30 am. I paced around and no one showed up. I thought maybe I was still asleep. It was so weird to be standing in an empty airport. Then I asked a custodian what the hell was going on, and he said that departures were in another terminal. By this time I only had about 55 minutes before my flight left. I got to the other terminal and they had just closed check-in, and the lady in front of me pushed me and no one would let me go up to the front of the line to beg them to let me check in. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I just went to the ticketing agent and asked to be put on another flight. It didn’t leave for another 8 hours, so I went and sat on a bench and tried to get away from the smell of food because I was starting to get so hungry and had no money to buy food again. Once I got on the plane I slept so soundly that I drooled all over myself and it was so disgusting and the flight attendant had to shake me almost violently to wake me up. I went out and saw my dad and I was so happy to be in my new home.

NYC 2002. I used to sit and smoke cigarettes in my English professor’s office in college. He was a dry man with a silver afro. He liked my writing and he and some of the other English professors were rallying together to try to get me to major in creative writing. I resisted, instead desiring to follow my pragmatic trajectory. But I loved talking to him, and I loved hearing his stories. His name was Barry Wallenstein. He knew Allen Ginsberg back in the day, talked about how he used to sit on the stoop with Allen and talk about poetry. He thought that Allen probably had a crush on him. I thought he was probably right. There was something alluring about Barry. He performed spoken word at a piano bar while people in the audience smoked cigarettes and wore black hats, drank scotch or red wine, talked about politics and Dostoevsky. He could be enigmatic, wore tweed with style, and had never married. He rarely smiled, but there was still a kind of warmth about him. I think he had a crush on me, because he took me under his wing and encouraged my poetry, and when I won an award he put a personal note in the envelope with the award money they sent me. One of my classmates, a girl who had been in love with him for months, bitterly told me that he never believed in anyone’s poetry and that the whole time she had known him, he never took anyone under his wing. I always had this strange sensation when I was with him that he was waiting for something, waiting for me to walk over to where he sat, lean over and kiss him. I never did. I’ve never been attracted to older men. After that semester was over I never saw either of them again.

That same year on New Year’s Eve I went to a hardcore party. They were held in abandoned warehouses in Queens and Brooklyn, this one was in Queens somewhere. At the time I was staying with a friend in Jersey while I looked for a place in Manhattan, so we had to take the Path and the subway. It was freezing and I had a thin leather trench on. We got to the party late, around 11pm. There were people lining the walls, faces melting off, sweating, just messed up. The entrance was crowded and small, but led into this huge cold room with concrete floors and metal columns bearing the weight of the building. There was a DJ against the wall to the right, and he was spinning Noise Core. It’s disturbing to hear, because it makes you feel like you’re hallucinating and that your ears are floating away and your arms are departing too and your legs are detaching. It makes you feel like you’re not yourself, like you’re coming apart into little pieces and it won’t stop, and you even forget your own name. It’s just noise, electronic noise with no rhythm, no sense, no pattern, just flailing, wailing, grinding, heart wrenching noise that grits itself deep into your soul and makes you want to scream to make sure that you can still hear your own voice, still make sense of things. I hated it, but I was with my friends and they wanted to stay there. I tried to escape into another room, but they were playing Speedcore, which is not too much better. And then another room was playing Hardcore, and I was able to fall asleep next to a speaker on the cold concrete floor with the rhythmic thud of the bassline blasting my little eardrums to oblivion. For two weeks after that I was violently ill and confined to the basement of my friend’s house. He still had his other friends over and the bed was right next to the pool table, so while everyone else smoked and drank and laughed and played pool, I laid in bed and wanted to die.

When I graduated college I started working at Cornell University Hospital on the Upper East Side. I worked in the neurology lab for the night shift. I would sit and stare at the computer screens, all of them taking readings from electrodes on the patients, and my eyes would feel like they were going to fall out of my head. Sometimes I tried reading or studying French. The lights were so bright and fluorescent, they made my skin feel crackly and dry, like a snake. I stopped being able to sleep at all, because I would be awake all night and then when I went home the adrenaline of New York and its morning liveliness would wake me up, because that was the thing about New York, it makes you feel alive, like you’re a part of something so huge, and something is going to happen at any moment and you don’t want to miss it. So I would walk the streets during the day and be so delirious and I started to see things differently. I was so unhappy. I became depressed and sometimes when my boyfriend and my friends were going out to bars as I was leaving for work, I would get so angry, even though it wasn’t his fault. And then I would cry when I got home and everyone else was at work so I was alone. I felt like I was on a different planet.

I am a pretty shy person. It was horrible when I was young, because I had not developed the ability to compensate for my shyness. It was painful. I would look at situations and analyze them, even at 5 years old I was always on the outside staring at people and their interactions, calculating how I should act in order not to bother them or make them angry or make them hate me. I didn’t want to be hated. It was one of my worst fears. I wanted people to like me so badly that I studied other people who were well liked. I wanted to be like them, but could never figure out how. It just didn’t feel right and I hated the sensation of being contrived. So I said nothing and did nothing. How can anyone be angry with someone who doesn’t do or say anything to them?

I met B. in Kindergarten. It was the first real friendship I had ever forged, and it was she who approached me. She was fearless and jubilant. She started talking to me and it made me feel good. It made me feel special, that out of all of the kids that surrounded us, she wanted to talk to me. I wondered why? What was it about me that made her want to talk to me? I couldn’t figure it out. We became best friends and hung out all the time, and even now, 23 years later, we are still friends.

I was in a wedding once when I was 5 or 6 years old, my aunt and uncle’s wedding on my mother’s side of the family. They curled my hair up and made me look pretty, even put some rouge on my cheeks. I remember arriving at the wedding location and feeling like I had been swept away and things were happening so fast. The next thing I remember is walking down the aisle and EVERYONE was staring at me, and I hated that. The moment I saw my mother I freaked out, started crying uncontrollably, and dove head first into the pew where she was sitting. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, and felt like I had ruined everything. I don’t remember anything else from that night.

When I was in Third Grade there was this guy that I liked. I had the biggest crush on him, but I couldn’t talk to anyone, let alone talk to a guy I had a crush on. There was this girl T., who he was in love with. He would follow her around and always laughed at her jokes and she would just smile and be nice to him. She wanted nothing to do with him. I wanted so badly for him to like me that I started wearing my hair just like her. I think I even started talking like her. She was friends with some of my friends so I would hang out at her house every once in a while. I hated her and I was so jealous all the time, but I hid it well. Once I forgot about that guy, I also forgot about her and rarely thought of her after that.

I used to ride horses when I was growing up in the sticks in PA. My riding coach was a rough old man and he would yell and curse at me for being timid, not squeezing tightly enough with my legs, leaning forward before a jump or not looking up when I was going over a fence. Sometimes I would get angry and frustrated at his rudeness so that I could barely concentrate on what I was doing. Mostly I would listen to his advice and I became a really good rider because of that.

I think I was 11 or 12 when I fell off my first pony, a pretty little jerk named Lumiere. I named him Lumiere because even then I was a Francophile and his coat was all dark, but on certain parts it was slightly lighter, almost as if he had a light inside him. If you haven’t figured it out yet, “lumiere” means “light” in French. He was a beautiful animal. Once he refused a fence, but I did not. I went sailing over it and landed on my head. I woke up in the dust, and there were tears rolling down my cheeks. I had no idea what had happened and asked my mother why I was taking a nap in the dirt, and why the hell was I wearing someone else’s shirt? I had just bought the shirt the day before so instantly she knew that I had a concussion. “What day is it?” It took me a while to figure that one out. I was still trying to figure out why I was laying in the dirt. They rushed me to the hospital for a CAT scan and my mother was vigilant at my bedside for days after that.

At 14 years old I was training this little bastard horse and he decided to give me a hard time. He dropped his left shoulder and kicked his hind legs up a little. I fell forward and my wrist was crushed against his withers. I heard the popping sound as the growth plate on my left wrist snapped. It was excruciating and I immediately grew dizzy, started screaming. I looked down at my hand. It was limp and deformed looking, as if it didn’t belong to me. They rushed me to the hospital. I had gone into shock so it all felt like a dream, but I never stopped sobbing because the pain was unbearable. Then they gave me a shot of Demorall and I was in the most blissful state I had ever been in. I wanted more but they wouldn’t give me any to take home. They put a cast on and a few weeks later took it off. The cast was dirty and reeked of sweat and human. My hand was wrinkled and smelled even worse.

That same year I won champion in the Hunter class at PJA. I was riding my horse, Chester, and it was exilhirating to keep winning first place again and again and riding so smoothly the whole time that I new I was going to get first because it was just a perfect ride. After that, I never won first place again. It’s true that once you’re at the top, the only other place you can go is down. I went down real fast.

To be continued…

It is summer.
Even though the sun stretches its arms out
to embrace the fatter days, June seems strained,
hot, too wet to be content and struggling to release
her load like a swollen breast.
At times she purges her milk,
showers stream down her cheeks,
her low rumbling gun shot pleases her and undermines posterity,
though she thinks fondly of certain aspects of life.

His gaze upon her face,
listening to him play the guitar while she reads poetry late at night.

Summer doesn’t need a lover.
She swelters and craves the swift
electric charge and loaded barrel to
carve her name into his heart,
pulls the skin back from her own ribs to expose
her love too, dousing it with her torrential drifts.

After the last gun shot of the rainy season, her final repose.