"Straight-Acting"

This is the fourteenth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


I met Earl late one night in 2003 when I was cruising gay chat-rooms on the Internet. Within minutes we figured out that we lived just one block away from each other -- we were typing from less than a hundred feet apart. In the spirit of adventure, he jovially invited me over for a beer. Whatever sexual strings might be attached were not discussed, so I figured I had better be prepared for nearly anything. I wrote down his address on a scrap of paper and left it on my pillow where my roommate could find it if I never turned up again. Three minutes later I was with Earl in his apartment.

He was as handsome as his photograph, a dying art in the world of online hook-ups. He was my age and seemed, in the parlance of hook-up culture, “straight-acting.” Over beers he talked to me a lot about law school and the time he spent studying abroad. He was so warm and engaging that I wasn’t alarmed in the slightest when asked if I “wanted to take some pills” with him. He was just being a good host, I reassured myself. When I demurred he merely shrugged and set to work crushing up the mystery pills with a paperweight on his desk so he could snort them. Already considering the evening’s social experiment a success but not wanting to push my luck, I yawned and made a gracious exit.

Earl and I hung out several more times in short succession, usually over drinks at a local bar. His easygoing nature made it unclear whether he was even remotely attracted to me, and naturally I was reluctant to find out otherwise, so I didn’t push it. When one of my emails and then the follow-up message I sent a few weeks later both went ignored, I figured I had my answer, along with a reminder that chance friendships have their own hyper-accelerated natural life-spans.

Not long ago I met a gentleman at a bar who was from Savannah, Georgia. “I used to know someone from Savannah,” I told him. “Maybe you know Earl?” And that’s how I found out that my old friend had been dead this whole time, nearly six years.

Earl, I learned from my new friend at the bar, came from a prestigious Savannah family for whom a gay son would have been a crushing liability. Well aware that there were eyes and ears and mouths even in New York City that, in one way or another, had connections back home, he was compelled to keep an extremely small and tidy closet. He surrounded himself with beautiful women and straight male friends, publicly dating the former whenever necessary and hiding in plain sight among the latter. Earl avoided making homosexual friends, and had only officially “come out” to one or two people in the whole world. I’d just happened to end up small-talking with one of them.

One evening in 2004, not long after he and I had met for the last time, Earl fell off the roof of an apartment building on the Lower East Side. It was one of those huge parties where people go up to the roof to smoke, and since everyone smokes, everyone is on the roof, laughing and screaming at the skyline and having the time of their over-indulgent young lives. There is drunken horseplay. In rare cases, I have heard, it is possible for a young man, even a second-year student in a prominent law program, to misjudge the true distance between two rooftops, to decide that he could easily leap from one to the other, to inadvertently cast himself into the alleyway like one more crumpled, empty wrapper.

I vividly remember a dream I once had in which my great-grandmother showed up at a family wedding, but refused to come all the way into the chapel. She paced back in forth in the foyer wringing her hands and protesting tearfully that no one had remembered to invite her. It was true, no one had, because she’d been dead for nearly a year. Upon waking up I realized that it was exactly a year ago, to the day, since I'd attended her funeral.

From that morning on, I always sort of assumed that people have a way of unconsciously keeping tabs on one another, even across unpardonable distances. During this encounter with a stranger in a crowded bar, during which our forgotten beers warmed in their bottles, I felt the subtle strings of that web winding around me again. To this stranger I was an important find -- I was proof that Earl had at least been secretly exploring, reaching out over the squalid Internet in the wee hours of the night, making contact, perhaps even having sex. I was evidence that Earl had lived, in some small way, as himself.

For me, there was only a grief gone stale before it could even be felt. Walking home that night I wondered if I’d ever remember anything about Earl except those messages I’d sent over the years, shout-outs no eyes had ever seen. Or the occasional fruitless searches on sites like Facebook -- fruitless because the person I was looking for had long since ceased to exist. It had been so easy to let it go after a few cursory attempts; to release Earl to what I assumed was a busy, illustrious life. If I’d been just a little more curious, I’d have had no trouble finding the page set up by his family to memorialize his “tragic accident.”

It’s hard not to grow bitter, reading those two words repeated over and over in comments posted years ago by people who had never known, would never know the truth. Tragic accident. As if the only the fall itself had been tragic, independent of anything leading up to it. As if some accidents could not be predicted with terrible accuracy by those in possession of more facts.

I wish I’d known them myself when it could have still mattered. But I must admit it was nice of Earl to circle back around anyway, after all this time, to let me know in his way.

Summary only...

"When's Mommy Coming Home?"

This is the twelfth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


When I decided to move to New York City, my parents were as supportive as they knew how to be. “If something bad happens, or if it’s just not working out, or if you need anything,” my mom said, “Just call… and we’ll buy you a ticket home.” Aside from this one-way offer, I’d have to sink or swim on my own, which I figured was only fair. So I proceeded to do both those things, sinking a little here, swimming a little there, and floating when I got tired -- which was often, because I couldn’t afford to eat much of anything.

Right away I landed an unpaid internship at a small publishing house. To my eyes this was a career-defining opportunity, a chance to make up for the vast waste of my old life. Who cared if it meant I couldn’t get a real full-time job anywhere else? This internship promised better things down the road, I told myself, which were more important than food. As long as I could scratch up enough to pay for my daily grapefruit and Cup-O-Noodles, I was set.

Then winter came, and hunger didn’t seem interesting or sexy to me anymore. It became a real drag, actually. My left eye began to twitch and flutter all the time, as did my left ventricle. I felt myself zombie-walking through my magical internship, trying to appear industrious when actually I was hoarding energy, trying to look like I was reading manuscripts when I was actually snoozing like a housecat. If it wasn’t for the illimitable fresh berries and mini-quiches of our catered publicity events, I probably wouldn’t have even made it till January. But even so, I woke up one morning with a definite sense that I’d reached the end. Rent was due, I was a hundred dollars short, and I had nothing to eat for breakfast. It was eleven degrees outside. Dragging myself to the office that morning, I knew what must be done.

Dear Mom, I typed. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but…

I was about halfway through the email when my boss pulled me aside. It just figured, I thought. Getting fired from a job that paid zero dollars an hour was the just the sort of final indignity I had coming to me.

Ted waited to speak until I’d closed his office door behind me. “How are you with kids?” he asked. Was I hearing right? He and his wife, he continued, had a four year old girl and eighteen-month-old boy. They were looking for a new babysitter. They were willing to pay ten dollars an hour. Did I have any experience with children? “Oh loads,” I said, lying through my teeth with starvation-flavored enthusiasm, “I come from a really big family, there were always babies around. I’ve been babysitting all my life, actually!”

I was prepared to claim wet-nurse experience if it meant I could stay in the city for just a few more months. And it wasn’t a monstrous lie. I had done my share of reluctant babysitting in high school; surely I could just call my mom if I had any questions. This, I decided, would be my gift to the rich, spoiled publishing heirs and heiresses of Manhattan. I would be just their Mary Poppins, with additional nose-ring and whisker stubble.

The job began immediately, as in that day. Ted’s wife, Iris, welcomed me into their sprawling brownstone. Immediately, my heart began to ache for her; she was clearly a sensitive and intelligent woman, but her naked gratitude for even five minutes of adult companionship made me wary. It also made me wonder how late Ted came home at night.

The children were cute, at least. The baby boy, Cal, was one of those radiantly sweet children with wise eyes who never cried more than absolutely necessary. His big sister was a fey beauty (by pre-school standards, anyway) and also quite a little storm-cloud. The first time Iris left us alone to play together, Alice set the tone for all our future days and nights together.“I am not your friend,” she said, looking up from her coloring book to punctuate the warning with meaningful eye contact. “Not yet perhaps,” I replied cheerfully, “But over time I hope we’ll grow to be quite good friends.” She just stared at me for a moment and then gently shook her head as if I was the thickest person she’d ever met.

And just like that, my ass was saved. I couldn’t believe my good fortune -- nor could I believe how trusting this family was. What kind of parents would relegate their children to a starving intern who’d lived in the city for less than six months? Ted had never so much as checked my references nor even seen my ID, yet here I was, in charge of keeping his baby from falling down the stairs. I was determined not to abuse that trust -- but I still couldn’t resist helping myself to a share of whatever food was prepared for the kids. A handful of Cheerios when Iris had her back turned, a jelly sandwich the second she left the house, a piece of chicken, endive from the Park Slope co-op -- anything left lying around was devoured. These people were rich by any definition I was familiar with, and they didn’t seem to notice or care how much they spent on food. Whenever I took Cal out in the stroller, Iris would hand me between five and ten dollars to buy him a snack, pointing me toward a nearby bistro. “He especially loves their stewed greens,” she told me. She never once asked for the change. Since he usually slept soundly through our entire outing, I ate for two. I didn’t see any harm in it, and besides: the greens were excellent. That baby had great taste.

The more time I spent around Iris, the worse I felt for her. I got the impression that she felt a bit out to sea, spending her late thirties chasing after two kids all day and night while Ted enjoyed quiet, civil days at the office, surrounded by the kind of New York aesthetes who spontaneously start speaking French over dinner in SoHo -- people whom until recently had been her contemporaries as well. Iris adored her children, but she was bitterly self-conscious about the changes motherhood had wrought on her body, her marriage, her entire identity. The few stolen hours she got to spend reading and writing poetry or swimming laps at the Y only enhanced her awareness of her isolation.

As months passed, she grew increasingly fragile and restless. She wanted to begin living her life again, she explained to me, but she couldn’t seem to remember where she’d left it. Once, at her request, I read her Tarot cards. I did so with much trepidation; I wanted to help her a little if I could, but I was already out of my league as a babysitter, I didn’t need to add impersonating a therapist to my list of crimes. Besides, I was afraid of her desperation, afraid of being relied on for more support than I wanted to give. And in my own hungry little heart I was quick to remind myself of the financial risk I’d be taking if I gave in and started feeding her the honest advice and support she craved. This job was the only thing keeping my head above water; if I wasn’t careful, I could wind up talking myself right off a ledge, with only a free ticket back to Arizona left to cling to.

I tried to avoid becoming a part of their family, but in the end, there I was: a queer sort of relation who came and went at odd hours, tending and eating and festering alongside the others for as many as thirty hours a week. As the gulf between her parents grew wider, moody little Alice had no choice but to accept my affection and entertainment. As grateful as I was for the concession, as happy as it made me to read to her or play the funny/scary monster in her games of make-believe, I could tell she resented having to outsource the work. The baby, of course, loved all of us with perfect angelic equanimity, regardless of whether anyone stayed out all night, or cried on the phone for hours, or broke dinner plans yet again. I hoped whatever was happening between Ted and Iris would sort itself out before Cal was old enough to be damaged by it. In the meantime I took more pride in helping him learn to walk and talk than in literally anything I'd ever done on my own. The children got to me in a way Iris had never been able to, slowly eroding my mercenary edge. The end of my year-long internship should have been a perfect opportunity to break away and pursue that real job I’d been pining for; instead, I began taking care of the kids full time.

As a result, the revelation of Ted’s affair wound up having more impact on my life than either of us would have liked. It was awkward: the woman was my age, and I knew her from the office -- we’d been interns together. Iris was the one who broke the news, which she presented to me as a triumph. Hadn’t she always known something was up? Not only did the discovery of this younger, slimmer, more confident woman confirm everything she suspected about Ted, it sprayed gasoline onto the suspicions she had about herself -- that she had been swallowed up by her own obsolescence, her loss of purpose, the age creeping over her soft body.

They would need me more than ever, she told me, to help get through this awful time. She wanted to leave him; naturally, Ted wanted her to stay and just sort of deal with it. “He says he loves us both, and wants to be with us both,” she complained tearfully, “Do you think that’s even possible?” I was so used to telling her whatever I figured would cause the least harm, I discovered that I no longer had any real feelings or opinions worth sharing. If I felt nothing, then I had nothing to hide.

She began losing weight, first industriously and then obsessively. She left her journals (she kept several) all over the house, no doubt planted for Ted so he could read all about the agony he was putting her through. Knowing he would never bother, I read them all. I analyzed each dog-eared page, scanning for signs and portents of the future -- mine as well as hers. What could I do to help? I am not her friend, I tried to remind myself. But if that was the case, why did I bother, why did I return day after day? Why delicately peel up the dried pool of indigo paint from their exquisite hardwood floors, why scoop the cats’ shit out of the bathtub or the rotten food out of the kitchen sink, why scrub marker scrawls off of the walls? Why try to erase the signs of depression and decay creeping in from all sides -- because it was my job?

The children and I clung to each other during this time. We had many late nights together. “When’s MOMMY coming home?” Alice would demand, enduring as the promised nine o’clock hour came and went, followed by ten, then eleven. “Soon,” I’d say, no longer sure which parent would return at this point, let alone when. At the sound of the key in the lock, both Alice and her brother would burst into spontaneous cranky tears of impatience and relief. Or worse, they’d both be fast asleep across my lap with the TV light shining on their sweaty foreheads, having long ago succumbed to the realization that all grownups are liars, that no one was never coming home.

One evening mommy came home early. Alice was still upstairs playing with the neighbors, so I had a few minutes to talk with Iris over the baby’s head as he built the longest toy railroad track in the history of the world. She barely looked like herself anymore -- her hair was freshly chopped off short, and she’d slimmed down to the point of looking frantic and angular. She even sounded different, more intense. I made a mental note to see what prescriptions she was taking. “Ted says I’ve got to get a job,” she said acidly. The idea of entering the work force at her age, after six years of full-time mothering, had stoked her fear and anger. She couldn’t stop thinking about that bitch, how she was now practically running things over at Ted’s office. “I’ve never been that kind of person,” Iris lamented, “That type-A personality who can just show up and take charge.”

At least I could relate to her there. “You know what? Me neither,” I chimed in, momentarily letting down my guard. “She started working there around the same time I did, but it seemed like she already knew how to do everything,” I explained how lost and inadequate I’d felt having to learn from the ground up, while competing against people like that bitch who seemed to have everything figured out. I was a bit surprised to find myself talking to Iris so freely. Bonding, even! I guess I should have known better.

“Oh right, because she’s so great, right?” she sputtered, cutting me off mid-sentence. “She’s perfect, she can do anything, but I can’t! That’s what you’re saying, right?” I stared at her, surprised into silence. “Well, thanks a lot. Maybe you’d better go.” She got up and whirled out of the room. I was cut to the quick. What was I supposed to have said? Then there was a sudden crash in the guest bedroom, and the sound of glass breaking.

“Iris? Are you okay?”

“Keep Cal in the living room,” her quavering voice floated to me through the door, as if she was somewhere very far away. “I… um, I think I’m going to take this place apart.” What? There was another crash, louder, larger. The baby began to cry; I gathered him up in my arms. I listened as she tipped the heavy glass-doored bureau in the TV room onto its face. The floor shook.

I hid Cal’s face as Iris emerged and stampeded down the long hallway, toppling the furniture and tearing framed pictures off the walls, destroying everything she could reach. Shattered glass was strewn behind her in a glittering warpath. I followed delicately behind, listening to her grunt and cry as she demolished her own bedroom. I didn’t see any blood -- it was a miracle she hadn't been cut. Having run out of things to break, Iris lunged toward the window and threw it open with all her strength, leaning out over the alleyway and screaming her lungs out at the night sky. At the sound of it the baby began to shriek and convulse in my arms, as if in physical torment.

That was my limit. Seizing her by the hand, I yanked Iris back from the windowsill and marched her back down the hall and depositing her body on the couch. She was already deflating, as if all the energy had drained out of her with that awful scream. I thrust Cal at her. “You scared your son,” I hissed at her. “Take care of him! Alice will be home any minute and there’s glass all over.” In a trance, she accepted the child. Mother and son panted together quietly.

Where to even begin? The glass was absolutely everywhere -- had been pulverized in places, the dust sparkling in the cracks between floorboards. Holding back tears, I moved from room to room alternating between bare hands and dust pan, scanning and scraping, determined to sweep up every speck and make the house safe for children again. I righted the bureau and replaced all its contents, keeping an ear cocked in Iris’s direction in case she acted up again. I double- and triple-checked every surface with my bare hand -- better to have to tweeze the slivers out of my own flesh than from Alice’s or Cal’s. But this was the final threshold of my responsibility; I swore to myself I would leave this house and never return. Nothing was worth this.

I was just dragging a huge cardboard box full of wreckage out into the stairwell when Alice returned from her play-date. “I ate dinner upstairs,” she said cheerfully. Maybe the neighbors had overheard the demolition going on below and decided to keep her until things had quieted down. I swung her up onto my back so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

Within minutes I was gone; I left Iris sitting on the couch with a child on each knee. The woman looked pale and distracted, nodding and smiling unconvincingly as she listened to stories about Alice’s schoolday; one of her hands tapped and scratched against the coffee table absently, as if still intent on pulling something into pieces. I was afraid to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to stay for even one more minute, or even to speak. “Goodbye!” she called after me as I shut the door. I didn’t reply, didn’t turn around.

On my way to the train I dialed a number I’d jotted down on my way out the door -- a friend of Iris’s who took her out to lunch sometimes. “This is Tom the babysitter,” I told her. “Iris is in really bad shape. In about five minutes you need to call her, and you need to stay on the phone with her until you can tell she’s okay.” I hung up and went underground before she could ask any questions. Never again, I consoled myself. My commitment to this family was severed. Never again.

When I returned the following week, we both acted as if nothing had happened. On her way out, Iris left five dollars on the counter so we could get ice cream.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Empress

Summary only...

"I Managed, Even In My Preposterous State, To Blend In..."

This is the eleventh installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).

Years ago when my sister Leah applied for a job as a bank teller, she was caught off guard by one of the interviewer’s questions: “What’s the craziest costume you’ve ever worn?” She figured it was just one of those insidious getting-to-know you questions meant to give insight into her character. Ever the good sport, my sister admitted to having been a bag of jelly-beans once, for Halloween. She got the job -- but instead of ending up at a regular bank like she’d expected, she was assigned to one embedded in the side of a Wal-Mart. She didn’t draw a connection back to the interview question until the day her boss sent her wandering up and down the aisles of the store with a giant sombrero on her head, handing out fliers for free checking accounts.

Surrendering control over one’s appearance to another party is an exercise in humility that few adults are willing to endure -- and with good reason. We’ve already wrenched that control away from our fanciful (if well-meaning) parents. We’ve outrun the image-obsessed peer pressure of high school. We’ve fought damn hard for the right to determine our own self-image, even those of us who rarely change out of our bathrobes. We curate ourselves like overpriced historical exhibitions, a conferring this responsibility requires a lot of trust; otherwise, you’re just letting someone trot you around in a funny Mexican hat in exchange for a paycheck, making everyone who looks at you feel very sad.

This fall I found out that a friend of mine who's an opera director was desperately looking for a tenor for his upcoming show. I’m not an opera singer by anyone's standard, let alone what you’d call a tenor. I average about a C+ on karaoke exams. I’m not even really an performer anymore; I abandoned the idea in my early twenties when I left Arizona, a place where the local community-theatre pond was much smaller and safer to paddle around in. All of these details are the basis for a very funny joke I decided to make, in which I sent Scott a message offering my services. Wouldn’t it be hilariously awful, I wrote, if you tried to pass me off as a real singer? Just imagine.

When I woke up the next morning, there were an emails from Scott containing a rehearsal schedule, a synopsis, and a full vocal score.

This was no classical piece, it turns out -- it was an original work of operatic satire written by a thrice-Grammy-nominated composer. The part Scott was desperately trying to cast was the titular “know-it-all, full-of-himself, sadomasochistically well-endowed hog” who flees the farm to become a famous painter. Rehearsals were to begin in five days. Opening night was in three weeks.

I felt ill, felt as if I’d accidentally swallowed some kind of poison bait. Just as I was about to induce vomiting, the phone rang -- Scott calling to follow up. Despite my misgivings I picked up, afraid that if I didn’t answer he might start showing up at my house.

I have to wonder sometimes if Scott's success as a director is completely owed to his supernaturally mellow voice and light, rational demeanor. He may have missed his calling as an obstetrician. “The conductor and I have agreed that having a trained singer in the role isn't important,” he reassured me. “An actor would be just fine -- someone who can dive into the character and keep up with the rhythm. You can just speak-sing all your lines, just like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady!” Scott had directed me once, years ago, he reminded me. I'd been part of his chorus of horny sailors in a community-college rendition of South Pacific. He was charmed at the idea of working together once more, and seemed convinced that I could pull this off.

Also, the job would pay five hundred dollars.

I stalled at the edge of this decision quite miserably. I was terrified of humiliating myself and disappointing a friend -- maybe even ruining his career by casting permanent dispersions on his judgment. I'd have to seriously upset my work schedule to account for the show’s three-week run. And not least of all, I was intimidated by the costume, which would include, as he gently put it, “a full-body leotard and a fourteen-foot prosthetic dick.”

But then I remembered how wistful I get whenever I go to see a play. I always leave feeling so proud of the actors, and so jealous, remembering the excitement I used to feel onstage. I wasn't about to actually go out and audition for anything, but I’d always thought that if an opportunity ever “happened along,” I’d be game.

And again, five hundred dollars.

"I'll do it!" I said. I expected that once I committed to the project, I’d feel much more at ease; what happened instead was that I barely slept for the next three nights. Scott’s endless affirmations aside, I could not come to terms with the fact that I had accepted a lead role in an opera -- a sexually explicit one, no less. The only explanation for this seemed to be that I was mentally unstable and could no longer be trusted to care for myself. I lay awake those nights as if I was awaiting the executioner's axe, imagining the dismay my classically-trained cast members would feel the second I opened my mouth. The bewildered silence of the audience. The gleeful bitchiness of the theater critic. The sight of my thirty year-old, sedentary ass in pink spandex. For the first time since high school, I prayed for God to kill me and spare us all.

By the evening of the first rehearsal, I was definitely holding out hope that Scott would realize his error and replace me while there was still time. To my delight, everyone else in the cast seemed just as nervous as I was. A petite soprano named Melanie put me at ease by anguishing over how drastically under-prepared she was. “I’m going to be the person here who makes you feel much better about yourself,” she groaned as we prepared for the conductor’s signal. A moment later, she leapt into her part, singing gloriously and fearlessly through the opening scene. I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. All around me, voices braided in harmony, perfect to my ignorant ears. When it came time for the Pig to enter the farmyard, I growled and sneered through my lines like a good sport. It was as though I'd tracked mud into the music box, but nobody seemed to balk.

At the end of the night, our director gave us a pep talk. “I know this is scary, but we have no time to indulge in insecurity," Scott said in dulcet tones. "I guarantee you, veryone has something unique to contribute. At this point we all have to sort of drop our pants, look around, and get an idea of what we collectively have to work with.”

That evening he and I went costume shopping, hitting up Times Square's few remaining adult boutiques. He’d already rigged up a long coil of pink PVC hose to serve as my megafaunal shaft, he told me; now we just needed a way to anchor it to my body, and something to cap the end. And we must be very picky customers, as whatever we bought had to last the full run of the show. There were nothing left over in the budget for replacement “parts”.

After comparing several different strap-ons, both in and out of their boxes, Scott proclaimed a winner. He was afraid the black faux-leather belt might clash with my pretty pink leotard, but, he mused, it could always be painted to match. I eyed the thing begrudgingly. “Scott, the belt has a vagina,” I complained, pointing out the easy-access gap positioned just below the nubby dildo attachment. “It’s made for a woman. Don’t you think it’s going to look… well, strange on my body?”

“Oh, it’s going to look strange all right,” he grinned, lapping up my discomfort. He held up a round magenta knob from a nearby bin. “How about this for the end? I want it to be something that fits in your mouth, in case we work that into the blocking. You know, for when they gag you during the trial!” I weakly admitted that I could probably manage to make it work. No doubt impressed by Scott’s natural air of authority, a passerby interrupted us to ask for recommendations. “For my wife,” the old man clarified, “...She likes ‘em pretty big.” My acting may be pretty rusty, but I still know an exit cue when I hear one.

The next evening I came to the studio early to try on my stretchy pink leotard. It had little pajama footies at the bottom and a zipper up the back, and was just close enough to the color of my actual skin to make me look strangely naked, like a carcass in a butcher shop. “You’re going to have to wear different underwear,” Scott observed. Looking down, I could see my dark briefs showing through, the seams standing out in bas-relief, like welts. I might as well have been wearing them on the outside.

Hearing voices approaching in the hall, I began struggling back into my clothes. “I just need a minute to change before everyone comes in!” I grunted. “I think you’ve misunderstood,” said Scott. “From now on, this is your rehearsal gear.” He tossed me two pairs of black socks to cover my hands and feet -- my “hooves” -- and then opened the door to let the others in. My humiliation lasted only as long as it took for the rest of the costumes to be passed out; there were enough udders, frilly tutus and rubber animal noses flying around that I managed, even in my preposterous state, to blend in.

Over the next two weeks I struggled to grow into my costume; I figured out exactly how to spool my cumbersome yards-long hose over one shoulder so that it would unroll from my groin in perfectly flaccid coils. I learned how to adjust the cords of the nightmarish strap-on belt so that everything looked… well, symmetrical at least. In the final scene, after the Pig was slain by the greedy Farmer, I had just a few seconds backstage to wriggle into an enormous pair of feathery wings, re-emerging as a filthy porcine angel. I got through these rehearsals by pretending I’d been cast in a John Waters movie, where there were no rewards for a half-hearted or self-conscious performance: only through an unwavering commitment to pure nonsense would I be redeemed.

It was in this spirit that I decided to perform a little surgery on my crotchless strap-on garment, counterbalancing its feminine construction with a huge set of fuzzy pink testicles. Crafted from a three-dollar pair of ankle socks and pinned dangerously close to my real anatomy, I had to admit that the balls were quite eye-catching -- a final absurd touch which I hoped would give me an extra boost of confidence on opening night when I finally faced the firing squad. I submitted my new junk to Scott for director-approval.“Those are… well, they’re really out there!” he said. If even he seemed doubtful, I knew I had to be on the right track.

As I crouched behind a dark curtain on opening night, awaiting my cue from the orchestra, I practiced blocking the audience from my mind entirely. I planned to go onstage as if I was diving into cold water; I'd jump, swim to the edge in a panic as soon as I landed, and get out as fast as I could. And then I'd cover up with a towel.

When the moment arrived, I held my breath and walked out onstage. Instantly there was a brief pause as air was sucked out of the room by gasps, followed by a whoosh of laughter as it was exhaled. Laughter! I'd been taking my dilemma so seriously, I totally forgot there would be laughter. When the Farmer yanked my schlong out of my hoof-hands and unrolled it so that the chorus-girls could use it as a jump rope, the hoots from the crowd drowned out whatever inhibitions I had left, like a balm spreading over my brain. It ought to have been the ultimate humiliation (by my mother’s standards it probably still is) but my fears of exposure were laughable as well. I was invisible -- my real persona was perfectly hidden behind a veil of snout and fuzzy balls and gravelly pig-voice, to the point that I vanished utterly the moment eyes were laid upon me. It was, after all, just as Scott promised. All they saw was the cartoon, not the screen it appeared on.

The spell only lasted as long as the performance itself. During the audience meet-and-greet after the curtain, I received heartfelt congratulations from my friends, but among the lingering strangers there were few who could look me in the face; everywhere I looked I saw eyes skim over and past me, smiles shyly averted. Crap, I thought. Without the "magic of the theatre" lending credibility to my skinny shanks and unforgivable protuberance, I realized, it had turned out to be just another one of those sombrero moments after all.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Fool

Summary only...

"My Eyes Open In The Darkness..."

This is the tenth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


I try to keep track of all my bad dreams, even the waking ones; what follows is a list of all the times since moving to New York when I’ve been awakened from a deep sleep by something terrible.


1. I am 23 and brand new to the city, sharing a crummy second-floor apartment in Greenpoint, practically next door to the local sewage treatment plant. I adjust pretty quickly to all the bumping and shouting downstairs -- the landlord's family lives right below us, and they're one of those vibrant households who show love for each other by screaming at the top of their lungs, slamming doors, and heaving large objects at one another from across the house. So when I'm roused one night by thumping in the hall, I just roll over and begin to fall back sleep. Moments later, our door rattles in its frame and the landlord’s twelve-year-old son pounds on it, squealing, “Fire, fire, there’s a fire! Everyone get out now!”

I sit up in the dark, wondering what I should grab on my way out. It’s useless -- I just moved across the whole country, so I’ve already gotten rid of anything I can spare. Everything seems equally essential and non-essential; deciding that people will feel much sorrier for me if I’ve lost everything, I don’t even put on my shoes, I just wrap a quilt around my body and skid down the stairs, just in time to meet the firemen at the door.

It turns out that it’s not even our building that’s burning, it’s the industrial laundry across the interior of the block. We can’t even see the fire, though there is smoke and ash in the air. After hunkering on the cold sidewalk for about fifteen minutes, we're allowed back inside: the authorities have decreed that the fire is no longer in danger of spreading. I'm a little disappointed that my first "this is not a drill" fire proves to be so anticlimactic. However, once back inside, my roommate and I discover that our kitchen windows afford a truly astonishing view of the burning laundry; the fire doesn’t actually look even remotely contained, we observe happily: huge greasy flames surge two stories into the air, blotting out the sky and giving off heat we can feel on our faces through the window glass. We fill an entire roll of film with pictures. Later, neither of us ever remembers to get them developed.


2. The following summer. There is an ear-splitting, drywall-rattling explosion. In a brainless panic I lunge out of bed and run toward the window to scan the skyline, my vision already blurry with tears in anticipation of what I'm about to see. Or not see. This is what I get, I scold myself, for moving here so soon after the attacks. FUCK. Car alarms from every direction are screaming in unison. I yank open the ratty screen and stick my head out the window, looking up and around wildly. A raindrop hits me right between the eyebrows; otherwise, all is calm.

Still panting, I go back to bed, feeling sort of stupid. I swear on my kneecaps though -- never before or since have I ever heard thunder that god-damned loud.


3. One year later, I’ve moved to new apartment -- three bedrooms, ground floor, a stone’s throw from Bushwick Avenue near the L train. Tex will move in and share my room eventually, but for now he just camps out several nights a week. We discover right away that having a street-level bedroom is sort of like having a tent pitched on the sidewalk. We hear every vehicle, every conversation, every footstep that passes. On one of my first nights in the new place, the two of us are jolted awake by a shrill mechanical roar from just a few yards away, as if a very large vehicle is seconds from ramming the wall overhead and running right over top of us. Lights shining in through the windows above us seem to confirm this possibility. Tex and I wail and clutch at each other convulsively like frenzied toddlers, until we realize that it’s actually just the hydraulic song of our weekly garbage pick-up. You sort of get used to it after a while, we discover.


4. My sister Kelly has graduated from college and moves into the next room. One night soon afterward, I find myself suddenly awake for no reason I'm aware of. When I roll over I get a jolt: Kelly is in our room, creeping towards the bed on her hands and knees, her long hair hanging in her face -- rather like that little girl in The Ring. I shout my surprise and dismay. When she responds in stifled gurgles, I realize this is an emergency. Help, I can’t breathe, she croaks almost inaudibly, her windpipe clenched to a pinhole.

My sister has had asthma nearly her entire life; the attacks sometimes trigger anxiety attacks which worsen the asthma symptoms, creating a dangerous negative-feedback loop. She has an inhaler, but if she panics and takes too many chuffs on it, the overdose can actually make symptoms worse. All of these details run through my head as I bolt over to her, trying to decide whether I should call an ambulance. She can’t speak well enough to tell me what’s wrong, she just keeps choking on her own throat and gasping I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay if I can just calm down, but what if I’m wrong? What if she dies because I’m wrong?

Her body is half-rigid, so I lift and half-carry her back to bed, telling her she’s okay, she’s okay, she can breathe, she just needs to relax and let it happen. I am still not sure that this is the case, but I keep saying it, hoping to will it into truth. I lay down next to her, stroking her spasming back and shoulders and drawing deep, sympathetic breaths, encouraging her lungs to remember their natural rhythm. Together we begin coaxing ragged inhalations and exhalations from her grateful lungs; now she can finally think and breathe clearly enough to cry.

This may have been a closer call than I thought -- she tells me about waking up with an itchy throat, her mouth full of hives, her throat drawing closed. As it turns out, this is also the story of how Kelly finds out she has become allergic to raspberries.


5. Six months later, Tex and I have moved into the larger, quieter back bedroom. My eyes open in the darkness because of a sound that I can’t quite place -- a steady tapping coming from the wall near the foot of our bed. Groping blindly for the wall, I press my palm flat against it, hoping to get a better sense of where the sound is coming from; instantly a sleeve of cold water floods over my hand and down my arm. Cursing, I leap for the light switch. I literally can’t believe my adjusting eyes: there is a waterfall in our room, two feet wide from ceiling to floor. I begin hurling blankets and towels grabbed at random, stanching the spread of what turns out to be the upstairs neighbor’s dirty dishwater -- a pipe has disintegrated somewhere within the walls, and the water has rerouted itself to follow the path of least resistance.

"It’s an old building," the super explains the next day with a shrug and a daft grin, "What can you do?" Not much, apparently. That summer, the adjacent outer wall remains so perpetually damp that a carpet of weeds sprouts from the soft, crumbling wood, pushing toward the sun through cracks in the aluminum siding.


6. During our last month in the Bushwick apartment, I receive my first actual middle-of-the-night emergency phone call. It is just after 4 AM. Kelly is at the police station. She is literally not herself -- despair has distorted her voice, rendered her unrecognizable. My sister was out with friends at a bar, she tells me. One of them decided that she’d had too many drinks to walk home safely, so with the best of intentions, he hailed a cab for her -- one of the sleek, black outfits from the neighborhood car service -- and pointed her homeward.

Kelly no longer lives with us, so “home” is a little farther away than it used to be. Midway through the journey, the driver pulls over to the curb and stops. They are nowhere, she realizes, idling somewhere in a desolate maze of factories and industrial warehouses. Alarmed, my sister struggles to overcome the alcohol in her brain and asks the man to keep driving. He doesn't respond. Then the vulnerability of her position begins to dawn on her, and she begs him to keep driving. He demurs, switches off the ignition instead. He gets out of the car. He opens her door. He climbs into the backseat.

On the phone Kelly recalls these events out of order, shrilling out the details as they occur to her. I am too heartsick to hear any more than necessary. She begged as he groped her, she tells me. She was too scared to fight, too drunk to think clearly, and had nothing to bargain with except the contents of her purse, which ultimately he accepted in exchange for not taking things any further. The man ejected her into the street lost and disoriented, paying himself over a hundred dollars in cash in the bargain.

I get dressed in the dark. She is on her way to the hospital now, where they will inspect her bruises and officiously comb her for evidence -- a hair, anything -- that could tie her attacker to previous cases. At this late hour, the only way for me to get there in a hurry is by car service. I stare at the back of the driver’s head in stony silence, wishing I could stop his heart with the force of my irrational anger, wishing I could freeze his innocent blood into icy sludge.

Kelly bounces back fast. It’s what she does. During the next week she accompanies police officers on nighttime ride-alongs. The cops are, thankfully, as eager as she is to identify the false driver before he hurts anyone else. They tell her that to impersonate a driver, all someone has to do is steal the tags from a car-service vehicle and apply them to a similar make and model. It happens more often than we think.

They prove to be incapable of hunting down her assailant. As weeks pass, I am surprised at my capacity for impotent, unfair hatred -- walking through the neighborhood, these cars and their drivers are everywhere. I try to remind myself that mostly these are men with families, with sisters of their own. Still, it is a long time before I can see one without fighting the urge to flag him down, to lean in through the passenger-side window and hiss into his face: I know it was you.


7. Tex and I finally find our very own place, just the two of us. It’s less than three blocks away from my first New York apartment, but they’re three significant blocks, and our newly renovated one-bedroom apartment is in a grand old building with a real lobby and a generous view of the Manhattan skyline. I’m excited -- five years of toil and hardship in the city have finally yielded a result I can be somewhat proud of. We move in over Fourth of July weekend. We enjoy the fireworks from our very own roof.

A few nights later, we are rattled out of sleep by a series of rapid-fire reports coming from somewhere very nearby. BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! BLAM-BLAM! BLAM! We grip the bed in involuntary paroxysms of fright. “Someone’s shooting up the street!” Tex pants. No, I counterpoint, it’s just asshole kids setting off their leftover firecrackers, like they do every summer. Fucking asshole kids. We lay awake for several minutes listening for sirens, hearing only silence. “See?” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

The next morning I get up and leave early to meet a friend for coffee. When I skip down the stairs and out the front door, I’m greeted by streamers of yellow tape running up and down the length of the block, barring any cars and passersby. A single officer stands guard over the entrance to the apartment building three doors down from us; there is a body lying on the ground at his feet, draped in a white sheet -- too small to be an adult, I think. The pool of blood emanating from beneath the fabric has already begun drying at its sluggish edges.

As I pass through, I meekly ask the officer what happened. “A drug bust,” he tells me. Police were raiding the apartment when the dealer’s dog lunged at an officer -- was fired upon in self-defense. Glancing over the officer’s shoulder I can see bullet-holes in our neighbor’s sliding glass doors, right at street-level. The Sanitation Department has been dispatched to come pick up the body, the officer explains. But it’s Sunday. Could take a while.

That explains why we hadn’t heard any sirens, I realize. The cops were already here.

The next day we see an older man attempting to hose the bloodstain off the sidewalk; a faint shadow persists until after the first snowfall that winter. A lot of people move out of that building during the fall-- there always seems to be another truck parked outside of it, boxes coming in or out. Near the gutter where the dog’s body bled out, someone plants a tree; an early cold snap seems to stunt its growth, and after that all of its branches grow straight down.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Tower

Summary only...

"A Psychotic Ordeal, But Not Without Its Molten Center Of Ecstasy..."

This is the ninth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


Working phones is simple in theory: people call the restaurant to place either a delivery or pick-up order, or walk in and order something to go. I take their orders and their money, and when their order is ready, I pack it up in brown paper and put it in their hands -- or into the hands of the delivery rider, as the case may be. The phones shift is only three hours long; it's a stopgap, meant to straddle the peak of the dinner shift when the servers already have too much to handle without that whole mess, the point when activity reaches a fever pitch and the various Rube Goldberg production mechanisms that keep a restaurant running smoothly crest at a white-hot blur. It is a psychotic ordeal, but not without its molten center of ecstasy.

Dinnertime. I am squatting on a slippery rubber mat in a stifling kitchen. Balancing on the balls of my feet, my forehead inches from the mouth of the deep-fryer, tucking myself into a ball to keep out of everyone’s way, I fill small paper bags with fresh tortilla chips. They're too hot to touch with my hands, so I go at them with a pair of metal salad tongs. It’s like a skill-crane game in which all the toys are greasy, scalding hot, and extremely fragile. It puts the chips in the bag, I tell myself. It does this whenever it’s told. Now put the fucking chips in the bag! Above and around me, four cooks and three servers hurtle through the tiny room in meteoric loops. From somewhere behind there is a deafening crash, a puff of smoke, a cry of “Chinga tu Madre!” I don’t risk a glance upward, I keep plunging the tongs wrist-deep into my crunchy payload until all the bags are full. I take my time, I get it right. These few moments are all the preparation I have for what is coming. And then it happens -- somewhere nearby, a phone rings. And rings. And then another phone joins the chorus. Someone else may answer, but everyone knows that the calls are for me.

Sometimes the storm has already landed by the time I arrive -- both phones ringing, a fax order coming in, a line three people deep at the counter, three boxes of tacos cooling to trichinosal temperatures on the counter. The waitress stuck dealing with it looks like a horse in a lightning storm, and she's got three tables that haven’t even seen menus yet. I leap gallantly into the fray, biting back the urge to turn and walk right the hell out of there. But there’s also a sacred feeling, as if I’m an angel descending onto the battlefield at the critical moment. Hark! I want to say. Suffer no longer, for I bring tidings of --

Two cordless phones are thrust into my hands. “There’s a lady on hold for a delivery! We’re out of guacamole! If anyone from this address calls and asks, the food had to be remade and will be on its way, ASAP! The second server called in sick, you might have to take tables…” These words fading in volume as the unburdened soul is sucked back into her elliptical orbit through the kitchen, where mountains of grilled-fish tacos beckon with purple cabbage grins, awaiting her bearing.

I like the job because it’s impossible. There’s simply no human way to process thirty orders in thirty minutes without making colossal mistakes. Over the months I have reformatted my body and brain to meet the challenges on a synaptic level, limbs acting independently and unconsciously of each other, brain frantically calculating my trajectory around sharp turns and other bodies in motion while also answering questions and trying to remember to smile. It’s the final level of the hardest video game I’ve ever played, complete with blaring music and hidden bonus rounds. Oh help, I think. I don’t know how it could be, but both the despair and the satisfaction seem come from the same locus, somewhere at the very bottom of my heart.

When I was young, there was nothing I resented more than futility in labor. I gave up on math in fourth grade when it dawned on me that it was a limitless challenge -- it would just get harder and harder, year after year, class after class. The more I learned, the more aware I’d become of how much I didn’t know. I went home early that day feeling genuinely ill, and my grades declined steadily from that point on. Math for its own sake -- work for its own sake -- was not a fact of life I was willing to accept.

This was a pretty radical position to take in my father’s household, where work existed to be done, and we all existed to do it. Dad grew up on a cattle ranch in eastern Montana, an environment which required every man, woman, child and animal working together in concert, vigilant against the rising tides of ruin and humiliation. How lazy and spoiled and relatively suburban my sisters and I must have seemed to him, our childhoods uncomplicated by barn chores and seasonal labors that he’d endured ever since he was large enough to grip a hoe-handle. From this, I’m sure, came the perverse thrill he derived from assigning us the very nastiest chores, all of which seemed to require being outdoors in Arizona’s 115 degree heat. We scratched weeds out of the dry earth year-round, we washed the family car on days when the water vanished off its surface before you even had a chance to wipe it away. My sisters and I bond now over memories of being rented out to our grandparents for the purpose of gathering up a full year’s worth of dried dogshit from their backyard. Manufactured by their two well-fed Pomeranians and left to bake in the sun, the nuggets were nearly indistinguishable from the pale gravel, and almost as plentiful. Armed with one plastic glove and one heavy duty trash bag, the elected child would spend hours bending and squinting and bare-handed scooping in exchange for a few dollars and a cold soda.

The lesson I took from this, of course, was that work was for suckers, a fraud perpetrated upon those too weak to pull free, too dumb to think and do for themselves. Growing up and moving out, I applied for the kinds of jobs where you could get by for a long time on the bare minimum of effort, counting on my ability to stay one step ahead of my managers despite barely meeting their incredibly low standards for grooming, civility, and punctuality. I shirked my sidework as a graveyard-shift waiter at Denny’s, I fabricated positive results as a cold-calling insurance telemarketer. During my stint as a retail clerk, I held a paperback under the counter with one hand while ringing up customers with the other. This approach to making a living endured much later into my life than I’m altogether comfortable admitting. Whenever my resolve threatened to strengthen, I’d call my dad and complain about my job. “When I was your age,” he’d warn, “I was working on the killing floor of a slaughter-house, slitting throats from dawn till dusk.” It was an instant re-affirmation of my chosen path.

Despite how it beckons to dreamers, New York is a city that delights in sloughing away its fools and layabouts -- the poor ones, anyway. Very soon after I arrived it became obvious that my survival here would utterly hinge on my willingness to bend my neck and accept the yoke. At first, the only way I could tolerate this was by making the work as personal as possible, holding myself hostage with thoughts about who might get hurt or go hungry if I didn’t do my job. This managed to float me through gigs as a babysitter, a substitute teacher, a personal assistant. When I finally found steady work as a freelance writer, I learned the other half of that lesson -- you either finish the work or you don’t, and there is no one to outsmart, betray, or starve but yourself. It doesn't get more personal than that. But would it ever translate into an ability to do the kind of work that I spent a lifetime avoiding? I had to know this. Working phones is more than just my backup paycheck. It has become my alchemical laboratory.

I chose this, I remind myself as I answer the phones. Every night, I choose it all over again -- feathers becoming ruffled, people crowding up around the counter hungrily (hangrily, a co-worker of mine would say, referring to the onset of crabbiness owing purely to famine) and growing more irritable by the minute as some other person’s order comes up, and then another’s; pens drying up in my hand, paper tickets fluttering away out of sight, rendering whole orders untraceable. The brainless phones or ding-ding “food’s up!” bell interrupting every divergent gesture or thought. Completed orders bagged and then lost in the vortex as I scramble from one emergency to the next.

I put on a brave face for customers, hoping they’ll notice my speed, precision, and flexibility instead of my sweaty face, my twitching eye. I coax them through the hoops of ordering as gently as time allows. I answer the phone for the sixth time in a minute, and a tinny voice lisps into my ear, faint as a trans-atlantic radio signal, asks if I will take a credit card over the phone. And do I have any soups? Any recommendations for someone who isn’t actually very hungry? What kind of tacos do you have? How long will a delivery take?

My brain begins to hurl itself against the walls of my skull, hearing this. Our tacos, I want to hiss, are forged in a cauldron of strife. They are wrought in suffering. By the time you receive them, your tacos will have tested the limitations of at least four desperately busy, hardworking people. Hands quivering with fatigue, neck tendons visible, hearts hammering, we will put the sour cream on the side for you, we will add the extra salsa. These, I would say if I could, are blood tacos.

“It will be about forty minutes,” I say instead, scribbling down the wretched card number and moving on to the next call. That’s yet another way in which pressure eats at my sould; it turns out that all my horrible suspicions about human nature are waiting to jump to the forefront at once, desperate for opportunities to be substantiated, to lie to me about who someone is and what they’re really like. Even banalities like hearing someone botch the pronunciation of the word chimichanga are enough to stir them awake. Probably, nobody loves you, I’ve thought at someone as they handed me their money, and I can’t say I blame them.

There is nothing to do in these moments except move on, and on, and still further on until I become blind to the unfairness and imbalance of the world and lose myself in pure, mindless movement, the terrifying dance of energy and matter. This is where the work itself often becomes mysteriously transcendent; I have begun to think of each shift as a crucible, an abridged crisis just intense enough to boil away the scant flesh of complacency, the worst in myself, the sores in my psyche. Sometimes they vanish as soon as the air hits them, like toxic vapors. I emerge raw, cleaner. It’s like a trip to the Russian bath-house, where you sit in underground rooms so hot that it literally hurts to breath, and just when you feel like you may panic or suffocate if you don’t get out right now, someone dumps a ten-gallon bucket of ice-water over your head. It shocks you sputtering and swearing back to your senses, resetting all your gauges. After several blurry hours spent hurtling from one extreme sensation to the next, my very bones feel pliable, my muscles buttery smooth, my skin practically bioluminescent. Suffering and submission are not inherently ennobling, I remind myself as the chips shatter in the grip of my clumsy tongs, but the potential is always there.

I think of my father often when I’m drowning my way through a shift on the phones, dispatching orders with a relentless intensity and accuracy. When the restaurant becomes like an WWII submarine movie, all strobing lights and jets of water and flame, I know of no one else to credit for my instinct to dive into the smoke and begin pulling my fellow mariners out of the fire. I have witnessed dinner-shift miracles that I can’t explain, battlefield crises that should not have been rebounded from. My colleagues and I bask afterward in the lull, nerves humming as we drink in enormity of our collective feat. It’s silly, I think later, it’s only a restaurant, nobody cares, we’ll all do exactly the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, until something breaks in us and we can’t take it anymore. Pointless. But there is no mistaking the pride I take in my work while I’m doing it, an experience so relatively new that I find it nearly intoxicating -- nourishing, even. Quit this job? And lose the chance to be beaten like soft lead into some new, better shape, twice a week? It means more to me than I ever thought possible.

Dad is in his fifties now, and degenerative arthritis has seized up most of his joints, slowing him down considerably; he claims that he can dislocate his knuckles by making a tight fist. He’s been dragging himself toward the finish line of retirement with full benefits for years now, but due to various unforeseen complications and some-restrictions-may-apply, that line keeps inching out of reach. One more year, I have heard him say for several years now. One more. It hurts him to stand, it hurts him to sit, it hurts him to ride his motorcycle to work but he does it anyway because it thrills him. We talk on the phone about our jobs and the respective shit-heads who complicate them, exchanging the heavily salted dialogue of people who routinely work harder than absolutely necessary. I used to think that I’d be better off never being able to speak his language. Now, weighing my lifelong desire to do things my own way against the sympathetic twinges I feel when he describes his ailments to me, battle scars accumulated during a lifetime of grueling physical work, I come up even every time, both hands equally full. How is that possible? I wonder. This man, with whom I once hauled rocks out of dry creek-beds and built a stone wall around our yard’s perimeter, doesn’t have an answer, doesn’t need one. “It is what it is,” he says at least once every time we talk. I really hope so, I think.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Temperance

Summary only...

"One Night That Fall, My Doorbell Rang At 2 AM..."

This is the eighth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


My friend Owen had the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard in real life. I learned later that he’d left home some years back as part of a criminal sentence -- the judge offered him a choice between jail time in New York or rehab in Arizona. What junkie hoodlum teenager wouldn’t elect to go West under such circumstances? He took the treatment program very seriously, enjoying years of perfect sobriety -- his first since about 7th grade. Owen found steady employment, a long-term relationship, a sense of purpose. But then he slipped, and kept slipping until you couldn’t even really call it “slipping” anymore. Before long he was in worse shape than ever, disappearing for days on end and returning home to his frantic girlfriend with no knowledge of where his cuts and bruises had come from, or what had happened to his shoes, or how they would pay their rent.

This was when I first met him; we were both waiters at a fancy restaurant in Arizona. He wasn’t what you’d call a reliable co-worker. He was a frequent no-call, no-show, and he was churlish and red-eyed when he did show, though he’d perk up considerably after a trip to the walk-in refrigerator where he and the cooks could sample cocaine in peace. He’d already been fired five or six times, but the owner’s wife had a soft spot for this lost boy and could never resist taking him on again if he asked contritely enough. Also, I think that when he actually came to work, Owen was great for business. Customers who’d actually traveled a bit were charmed by his authentically rude, supernaturally charismatic New York flavor. He was an exotic, a welcome relief from the cheerful armies of local high-school graduates that all the chain restaurants hire. And of course, he was very familiar with the wine list.

We became good friends, for some reason. Owen was no occultist, but he admired Aleister Crowley, often quoting from his poems or the novel Diary of a Drug Fiend. He introduced me to Crowley’s Tarot deck, pointing out the Hanged Man card as the one he’d always related to the most. The man on the card was formless, nailed down by his hands and feet. The significance was obvious; Owen regretted that his entire adult life had been spent mitigating his sickness, but his awareness of this fact had somehow never translated into freedom. His addictions had impoverished him physically, financially, and mentally, and still there was no slowing his descent; he once confided in me through a bilious blood-whiskey haze that the only sensations he was capable of feeling acutely anymore were pain and thirst. I was very relieved when his long-suffering family in Queens agreed to welcome him back home to New York and supervise his return to sobriety. It happened very quickly; within days of the news I was saying goodbye to Owen at the Greyhound station. The gritty five-day bus ride from Phoenix to Port Authority would be his longest stint of sobriety since we’d known each other -- a trans-continental mandatory detox. I cried a little when he got on the Greyhound. I promised I’d come visit.

I kept my promise and then some, moving to Brooklyn two years later. I’d looked forward to seeing him right away, but as weeks went by it seemed he was still a no-call, no-show. We hadn’t talked much, and I’d heard from mutual friends that he hadn’t exactly straightened things out the way he’d planned to -- that in fact he was worse than ever, and that his family had given up hope and washed their hands of the whole mess. Perhaps he felt he’d let me down too, and was embarrassed to show himself. Or perhaps he was just fucked up and oblivious, and didn’t care about being friends anymore. I figured that, like any stray animal, he’d turn up whenever he was ready.

One night that fall, my doorbell rang at 2 a.m. The sound startled me out of sleep and sent me stumbling all the way downstairs in just boxers and a t-shirt to answer the door -- I assumed it was some kind of emergency. I was so glad to see Owen standing on the stoop instead that I accidentally let the front door of the building close behind me -- I hadn’t grabbed my keys. “That’s okay,” he said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.” Something about his demeanor was oddly unfamiliar. Nevertheless, when he beckoned I followed him to the curb. A car was waiting there. I was barefoot and the sidewalk was chilly. I thought, Might as well see what he wants before I wake up the house trying to get back in.

Then it occurred to me what was different: Owen was drunk. Scary, blackout-league drunk, but holding it all together by sheer force of will just for my benefit, the way career drunks can. This was not down-and-out Arizona Owen -- this was New York Owen in all his terrible, unchecked splendor. My self-preservation instincts tingled. There was no way on Earth I’d let him drive me anywhere, I decided, and told him so. "Nah, I know," he said. “Go around over there and just sit down for a minute.” He pointed to the passenger side. I balked, but he reassured me, “Don't worry. Look, we’re not going anywhere.” Well, okay then. I padded gingerly across the pavement and into the street and opened the passenger-side door.

There was someone passed out across the back seat, a guy I didn’t recognize at all. “Need me to help get rid of the body?” I asked. I rested tentatively in the passenger seat, leaving my door wide open and hanging one leg out, careful not to give the slightest impression that I was along for the ride. But it was cold and I wasn’t dressed, so when Owen said he wanted to turn the engine on so he could run the heater, I didn’t protest. We dwelt there in ridiculous silence, the three of us. “So what did you want to show me?” I finally asked. I was tired and growing disappointed. Owen perked up. “Oh yeah... Okay, close your eyes.” And the second I followed his instructions, of course -- of course -- I heard the gearshift scrape and pop in its socket. The car leapt away from the curb.

Inarticulate yelling from me as I jerked my leg into the vehicle to keep the door from swinging closed on it. Pleading and demanding as the car hurtled around the corner onto Provost Street, still picking up speed. Owen smiled and ignored me, concentrating on the road, and it occurred to me that if I wanted to live, I should shut up and let him focus -- nothing I could say would sway him. I buckled my seat-belt. I tried to calm myself and take inventory of the situation, but all I could think of were the things I didn’t have. Clothes. Phone. Keys. Wallet. Money. Identification. In fact, no one even knew that I’d left the house. If we crashed and died -- something which I figured by now I totally deserved -- it would probably take over a week for them to figure out who the hell I was.

Our reeking friend in the back seat must have had similar concerns. Our speedy departure had rattled him awake, and he too began pleading for Owen to pull over. “C’mon, man... Slow down... You’re gonna kill us!” he whined. The pleas only motivated our driver to accelerate. We blew through a red light without slowing, then another and another as if we were being chased. My whole body clenched, awaiting the inevitable. When Owen finally braked a bit to turn a tight corner, the guy behind me seized the opportunity -- with a garbled scream he popped open the back door and threw himself out into the street. Looking over my shoulder I had a diminishing glimpse of him crawling out of the gutter. Neither Owen or I said a word. The door to the backseat snapped closed again on its own as we hauled ass up the ramp toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Now that we were alone, Owen started talking again, though I found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying because of his aggressive indifference to freeway lane-markings. He punctuated sentences by correctively veering toward the median in a way that made me (and some other startled-looking drivers) suspect he’d eventually try to cross it. It turns out that the thing he wanted to show me was the grave of Harry Houdini. The body was interred somewhere in one of the many cemeteries of Forest Park, deep in Queens, and Owen knew just where. As the speedometer quivered at 90 he told me the story of the magician’s tragic downfall, the one which everyone already knows, about the unexpected punch in the stomach which ruptured the magician’s appendix and sent him to death on All Hallows Eve, 1926. I could relate to the poor guy -- I was about to die my own very pointless death. I was utterly convinced of it. I began mentally catalog the unfinished projects I’d be leaving behind, soon to be discovered by my survivors as they pawed through my leftovers looking for answers, wondering how in the world they never noticed how totally fucking stupid I was. Stupid!

“Owen,” I said, straining to sound fully game, “Maybe I should drive. Why don’t you let me drive us there?” He either pretended not to hear me, or really didn’t; I don’t know which possibility was more unsettling. But we exited the freeway, so that was something at least. Where the hell were we? My entire knowledge of New York geography was based on the subway -- not much help here. An elevated subway track ran parallel to the road, I squinted to see if I could tell which train line it belonged to. There was no park in sight. I asked Owen where we were, careful to sound only casually interested. He found this question to be very funny. “We,” he smirked with homegrown pride, “…are in the ghetto.” He pulled over to the curb and parked.

He explained to me, looking straight in the eyes for the first time that night, that he was going to get out and go use the pay phone, and that afterward this dude and his girlfriend were going to drive over here to sell him a bag. "They won’t sell it to me unless I get in the car and ride around for a bit and taste it with them," he added. "So you just sit tight, and I’ll be back soon.”

“I thought we were going to the grave, Owen.” I had to admit that the original plan was beginning to sound a lot more alluring.

“Oh we are, we definitely are,” he laughed. And then he sprang out of the car and was off down the street. I checked: he took the keys with him.

Shivering in my underwear, I had plenty of time to curse myself. But then, who makes all their sharpest decisions after being suddenly awakened in the middle of the night? I resolved to focus on the present instead. For example: who knew when -- or even if -- Owen would return? I opened the car door. The world around me was strangely still, no pedestrians, no cars. Stepping carefully around the floral pattern of crushed green glass on the sidewalk, I realized that I could actually see a subway station in the distance -- the sign said Jamaica, the last stop on the E line, about an hour from home. I was overcome with relief until I remembered that I had no shoes and no money. Would the attendant let me through the turnstile without paying if I shared my sob story? What if there was no attendant? Maybe a police officer would give me a ride home if I explained my situation? But what if there was no officer? Meanwhile, there was always the chance that Owen could come back while I was gone and strand me here.

My backup plan was to call for help, or at least to let someone know what had happened. I scrounged in the car seats for change. What vehicle doesn’t have at least twenty-five cents in it somewhere? A junkie’s, I thought -- even the cup-holders and floor-mats were depressingly void. But as Owen was in no hurry to get back, I had plenty of time to search, and desperation as a powerful motivator. Eventually, I had a dime and three sticky nickels in my hand. I only knew two New York phone numbers by heart: my own, and my friend Alice’s. And Alice knew about Owen, would know what to do. Inching up the street again, I set my sights on a pay-phone and gave her a call.

The call went straight to voicemail. That caught me off guard -- I gave it my best shot: “Uh, hi Alice! This is Tom. And I just wanted to let you know in case something bad happens that I’m with Owen, and that he is pretty fucked up and I have been sort of… abducted? And I’m near the Jamaica stop of the E with no clothes or shoes. I mean, I have underwear on. And a shirt. I don’t mean to… scare you, but if I’m not home when you wake up and get this, you should probably call the police? Uh, okay, I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Bye.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I hung up the phone, listening as it digested my coins. Unsure about Plan C, I retreated to the car and locked the doors, miserably.

I must have fallen asleep -- at one instant it seemed that I was all alone, and the next the engine was turning over. Owen had a new light in his eye as he drove -- the score must have been good. “Owen, I thought you said I could drive now,” I complained, hoping I could get him to mis-remember our plans.

“Oh yeah, sorry about that,” he said, grinning. “We’re not far off now, anyway.” By the time on the radio display, if it could be trusted, it was almost four in the morning. A few minutes later we pulled over alongside a steep embankment in Forest Park. The earth was damp and spongy and I was still barefoot, but Owen was unfazed. “There’s a pair of old boots in the trunk. Help yourself!” Owen called, flipping me the keys and scrambling up the slope, out of sight. The keys! I slid into the driver’s seat, praising merciful Jesus, promising Him converts..

So why didn’t I just leave? Surely I could have eventually found the way back on my own. Surely he’d manage somehow -- it wouldn’t be his first time sleeping in the park. I sat there for a minute, weighing my logic against my loyalty. Well, I thought, I’ve got the keys. After all this I might as well at least get to see the damn grave. If it's even there. I crammed my bare feet into the crusty, overlarge boots and followed the sound of laughter up the slick embankment, into the trees.

This was one of the places he’d spent his childhood, a place where boys ran wild. Owen had always been full of these tales, and I believed them all, they were too wild to be made up. He told me about the time he and his friends climbed onto the roof of a warehouse and assaulted the windows of passing J trains, throwing bricks and screaming like demons from hell. The windows were virtually unbreakable, the bricks bounced right off -- but, he told me with relish, the passengers didn’t know that, and they were pretty freaked. He told me about the time that a dozen or so boys mobbed a convenience store, grabbing up everything they could get their hands on and laughing at helpless screams of the owner, confident he’d never be able to pick any of them out of a lineup. One of the boys actually got away with an entire rack of sunglasses, the kind that spins, which they had a hell of a time fitting into the back seat of the car as they made their getaway. Owen knew these stories were outlandish, and he made them really funny when he told them. But you could tell he also knew they were sad, and that’s what made him such a great person to know.

He led the way over the misty, garbage-strewn hills of Forest Park. He didn’t want to admit he had no idea where we were going -- at this point he just wanted to talk. He wanted to tell me everything, I realized; my head was just an empty space for him to fill up with all the best and worst parts of himself, the shards worth gluing back together. Despite all, I was touched that Owen would seek me out as a confessor, taking me out among the trees and strange noises of the park where reality could not intrude upon memory. It terrifies me to think of how often that warm, cozy feeling of obligation I felt must be mistaken for love.

My victory that early morning wasn’t one of good sense, it was one of pure endurance. Losing steam, Owen finally gave up and allowed me to aim us back toward the car. I got behind the wheel and drove, so grateful for the ridges of the pedals under my bare foot. My friend dozed next to me; I prodded him whenever I needed directions, and when in doubt I followed the Manhattan skyline, now clearly visible in the pale pink air. By the time we got back to my house, the sun had already risen. I double-parked and woke him to say goodbye. In the daylight he looked gray and unwell. Very casually, so as to disguise his great need, he asked me if he could please come up and sleep at my place for a few hours. Just a few hours.

I made hasty, lame excuses, as I handed him his keys. My refusal seemed to let all of the remaining air out of him. I turned and left quickly to keep from losing my resolve, leaving him slumped in the car, alone.

I thought he would come find me later, after he’d sobered up a bit -- maybe he would realize what he’d done, how bad he must have scared me, and apologize. Maybe it would scare him too, scare him enough to help him. I figured that we’d at least end up laughing about it together sometime, me recalling details that he had no memory of whatsoever. And I confess to holding out a small hope that he'd really fix himself and that maybe one day we'd even venture out to where the great Houdini was actually buried. Perhaps by then I would have stories of my own that he'd be interested in hearing. But the truth is that I never saw Owen again after that, and whatever bond held our friendship together during those short, eventful years expired that night, somewhere above the embankment of Cypress Hills Street -- remains buried there for all I know.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Hanged Man

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"These Artifacts Are Not My Property..."

This is the seventh installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


There are lots of reasons why it’s hard to be a writer, but most significant among them is that it seems to be a career path specifically designed to hurt your mother’s feelings. For some writers, that's the entire point -- if the old bitch isn’t keening into her handbag over everything they publish, they don’t feel they’re doing it quite right. As much as I’d love to be one of these bitter, dysfunctional individuals, it turns out that I'm still too fundamentally sensitive to my mother’s mental and emotional well-being to make that leap.

Not that I’m a perfect angel. I dropped out of college to write, and she's never let that one go. And meanwhile I've posted comments about my personal life on various Internet forums that would flatten her if she read them. My professional writing projects have included things like horror movie interviews, bar reviews, and one stage musical about lesbian erotica -- I doubt I could have chosen more alienating subjects. Mom, I tell people, is a gentle soul. Mom is a clean, honest, trusting, light-hearted individual who is made to cry easily. Mom won’t watch a movie if she suspects it has an unhappy ending. She finds catharsis to be overrated. Her own life, she claims, is hard enough already.

My sisters and I saw little evidence of this vulnerability as children. I guess that at least compared to kids ten-and-under, Mom was a pretty tough lady. No matter how far we were from home, misbehaving on a shopping trip got us frog-marched out of the store and driven straight home in blistering silence, and God help you when your father gets home. She was perpetually sending back her food at restaurants if it didn’t arrive exactly as ordered, or driving all the way back to the grocery store to get a refund on a bad melon. We worshiped and envied these magical adult superpowers. The general consensus among adults was that she was utterly delightful company, girlishly generous with her laughter and her attention, but we who were her responsibilities knew that she lived for responsibility itself. Her principles provided the script and direction for the play we were all putting on together. Contributions from Dad came in colorful, temperamental bursts -- art direction, I suppose, heavy on the pyrotechnics -- but Mom moved us all forward as steadily as a glacier.

But these, I have learned, are merely the masks adults wear in front of their children to reassure them that someone is in charge -- they ought not be mistaken for actual personality traits. This is why a child’s view of a parent, no matter how informed by decades of observation, is dangerously incomplete. It pains me to have to accept that nearly all of the personally significant experiences of my mother’s life happened either before I born or when I was safely out of earshot. But those are the facts -- the woman has always been a master of obfuscation. Only now that she’s in what she (frustratingly) refers to as her “crone years” is she slowly learning how to reveal herself to us. We're now privy to her unfiltered opinions, her concerns for herself and for the world, of which we still make up a significant part. Her tears, once a rare and terrifying sight to us, have finally lost their mystique. They’re regrettable in the way that all mom-tears are, but they’re also queerly similar to our own adult tears -- just one more bucket of suds at the car wash.

My mother has no script to consult as she learns how to fret over grown children -- she lost her own mom at twenty-three. My grandmother, Mina, suffered a brain event while babysitting my cousin and I, a slovenly pair of three-year-olds. My memory of that day is faint but it exists: Mina's phone call to my aunt when she felt something strange coming on, we kids being sent to play in the spare room so that Grandma could lie down and “get some rest,” When we were finally allowed out, she'd already been whisked to the hospital. My aunt prepared a pensive Spaghetti-O lunch while I sat at the dining room table with my coloring book. From a child’s perspective, it was an abrupt but mercifully quiet exit.

What a testament to Mom’s masking abilities that this was the extent of my loss! Somewhere in the background of my awareness, a young mother of two (with a third on the way -- meaning she’d already spent the better part of two years pregnant, or caring for a infant, or both) was struggling to survive a major crisis, while I scooped gravel in the yard. Meals were still served. Books were read aloud at sunset. They say kids are scarily observant, but that vision is terribly myopic. Wbe mom explained to me that Grandma had died, I’m sure I understood the sadness and finality of it, but there are Pink Panther cartoons that left a deeper impressions on me.

Mom still doesn’t like to talk about these things. Her life, remember, is hard enough already. But as we continue to age together, every now and then another hunk breaks off of the glacier, revealing important anthropological artifacts. In the middle of otherwise uneventful conversations we trip over partially-exposed fossils of memory, old loves and hurts that were flash-frozen and preserved intact, perfectly incorruptible. What am I supposed to do in these moments -- leave the remains where they lay and walk a wide berth around them? Can I dig them out and take them with me, or do they belong to the place where I found them? Neither of us seem to know.

One night on the phone, Mom described all the ways in which raising kids has changed since she was a young mother. She surprised me by off-handedly mentioning how hard it had been to raise her small children without Mina there to help. “Wow, I never thought of that before,” I said, delicately. I was afraid to push for details that might upset her.

She surprised me by continuing the thought on her own: “Plus I had to help make all of these decisions and funeral arrangements, and I was six months pregnant with Kelly at the time, so it wasn’t easy!” she said, laughing uneasily. “I even had to do her makeup for the funeral?”

And before either of us quite knew what was happening, Mom began telling the story, tying odds and ends of details together like rag-bundles. She told me about being at the hospital with her father and brother during Mina's final hours , translating the doctor's medical terminology into plain speech they could understand. She told me about the shock that came days later, when the three of them arrived at the funeral home to view the body: her mother’s corpse on display, exactly as it had been discharged from the hospital -- no “naturalistic” makeup, no makeup of any kind actually. No hairstyling, no pursed smile of eternal rest. Just this unkempt thing stuffed into her mother’s clothes. Something no one was ever meant to behold. A beautiful woman, Mina had been quite vain about her looks, and she had died in her prime, her early forties. To my mother, the thought of displaying such an unrecognizable ruin before an audience of loved ones was utterly offensive. It was an assault against a person who was not there to defend herself.

She told me how the funeral director apologized, informing her that they simply had no cosmeticians on staff. And how, with the actual funeral now mere hours away, she made an urgent case to her father and brother for a closed casket so that this wouldn’t be the rest of the family's final glimpse. And how my grandfather rejected the idea on principle: a closed casket would give people the idea that something unseemly had happened to Mina, that something was wrong. And how she kept trying to convince him that something was wrong, that there was something terribly wrong with presenting the bereaved -- whom were even now streaming into town to pay their final respects -- with a virtually unprepared cadaver. And how ultimately, despite her laments, the family could not be compelled to cover up the sight. The lid would remain open.

So, she told me, she drove home. Which is to say, she drove through a haze of tears to her parents’ house, where she gathered up armloads of the dead woman’s cosmetics. She plundered rooms and drawers where the smell of hairspray still lingered, rounding up the powders and cremes and devices of Mina’s daily beauty regimen. She told me how she drove back to the funeral parlor in a frenzy, hellbent on recreating from scratch a woman whom, until quite recently, would never be seen in public without lipstick. And about how upsetting it was to learn, firsthand, while painting her own mother, that cosmetics designed for living flesh don't actually do much for the dead, how the dry and unyielding skin laughed at her efforts. And how defeated she felt, washing everything off and starting over, smearing and washing and crying, pawing through the magic puzzle pieces that were supposed to fit together and form her mother’s face, coming up short again and again. Three generations of women inhabited the silence: one resting in death, one (my unborn sister) standing by patiently, and one frantically working to beat the clock. The end result, she told me, was the best you could hope for under the circumstances. The canvas that greeted guests that afternoon may not have been a masterpiece, but as a final gift from daughter to mother, it was better than nothing at all.

My mom’s voice was strangely neutral as she recalled all of this, as if she’d forgotten she was still speaking. On my end of the phone I’d been holding my breath, afraid of breaking the spell. When she finished, I wanted to ask lots of questions, including: “Are you taking any new prescriptions?” But instead I stammered, “Jesus, Mom. Why didn’t you ever tell me this story before?”

“Oh, you know," she sighed. "I guess I mostly just try not to think about it too much...” She laughed again hesitantly, in a way that hinted that the suds were catching up with her. “It was a long time ago.”

“But Mom. We’re your kids. Don’t you think we need to know these things? I mean, how long have you been holding that in? Twenty-five years? Don’t you need to talk about it? Don’t you think it would help?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed, sniffling. “Isn't bad enough that it happened at all? Why would I want to ruin anyone else’s day?”

That is the glacier talking, its inhuman patience and fortitude, its faultless geologic memory. And at the time, I'm sorry to say, it was the despicable writer in me that spoke back, warning her that I might want to write something about what she'd told me, probing for permission knowing full well that these artifacts are not my property, that she'll always keep the choicest bits under lock and key, details that she’ll take to her grave rather than risk ruining my day. But she said yes, I was welcome to write about it if I liked, though she couldn’t imagine anyone finding it very interesting.

Hi Mom, it’s just me talking straight to you now, even though you'd probably never read this far down the page in a story about yourself. For the record, it is interesting, and worth sharing, even if I have to fight myself and my concerns for you in order to write it down. You have your unknowable version of the truth, and I have mine. For the time being, I'm content with simply telling the story of you and I and the long distance phone call we shared, in which your tears became profound and terrible to me once again and I realized the near limitlessness of your endurance. As long as you continue to have a writer for a son, you're going to need it.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Strength

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