More

I didn’t want to walk down the old streets yesterday. I had what I thought was a meeting, which turned out to be a “social lunch,” and I was freaking out the whole time because talking without an agenda with a stranger is so precarious; who knows what kind of fucked up shit I'm going to say? I was conscious that I was smiling and enthusing a lot – “Ah, water, wonderful. Fabulous. Wonderful, a cheese grater. Great.” – and by the time I left I was cursing myself for grinning and babbling like an idiot. I’d been nervous on my way down, thinking about Joan Didion as I passed my old place on Fourth Avenue, which reminds me of my dead cats, Fang and Petunia, and how many things I screwed up while I lived there, the payphone downstairs where I'd go when I couldn't sleep and make distant phones ring.

These days I’m trying to shun the landmarks, stop mistaking them for mine, but every block has its history. I’ve been here so long. 

The lunch was on Eldridge Street. I deliberately took Forsythe, because it’s not as bad. I don’t want it, I don’t want the old associations. I’m done with being that person, and if I can’t do anything to help her, I want her to stop chasing me down, in her dirty white shirt and ripped tights, indignant about something. I just want to go somewhere today, me, Janice Erlbaum, 41 years old, credible adult, happily partnered, published author, teacher – nay, ed-u-ca-tor – noted philanthropist (as in “a lover of mankind,” HAH) – just, like, deal with today, just deal with feeling nervous and not good enough in advance of the lunch; deal with trying to walk down the street where the construction site has red mud pouring into the gutters like the Danube; singing Mary J. Blige to myself; occasionally apologizing out loud or muttering the words, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m a good person,” which I try to pass off as lyrics. 

And I’m thinking, “If I just stay in the moment, I’m okay.” I take some deep breaths and try to be all Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way about it, try to notice everything inside and around me with complete attention: the warehouse with the front gate open, everything on the metal shelves, the man sitting on a bucket and shelling peas in front, the ambulance across the street, every sound and every sensation, which lasted under five seconds, and then I was thinking ahead to class on Sunday and how I was going to tell everybody to be in the moment, and what great advice this was going to be.

And then I hit Stanton, and I was hit by the past. It just came around the corner, the way it did sometimes back in the 80s, just ran up on you and fucked your shit up out of nowhere for no reason (see: Jerry Dean in the park, the skinheads at Westbeth, the night outside Sophie’s on 5th Street when those guys jumped our guys and I stood there yelling, “Stop it! That’s not okay!” until someone lunged at me and I ran down to Avenue A yelling for someone to call the cops. See also: getting mugged at gunpoint with Dan on Park Place in Brooklyn at ten o’clock on Oscars Night 1989, huddling on the sidewalk in the plane crash position listening to them hit him with a pistol, indignant that this was how it was going to go down, so stupid and infuriating, that I wasn’t going to get to live the rest of my life).

Jesus Christ. I use that epithet a lot, especially for a Jew by birth. But I mean it in the Jewish way, in that I’m appealing to a Messiah that has not yet appeared, the divine intelligence who’s supposed to get us all to work together and not be shitheads and advance humanity and all universal life into something everlastingly vast and beautiful. The god I wish existed. That guy.

Big Brown Bag

My mother and I lived on Roosevelt Island.

This is 1979-1983, fifth grade through eighth, between Husband Three and Husband Four, "just me and her," plus the neglected Persian cat, and her lazy Susan of boyfriends. Roosevelt Island was a spit in the East River, its newish condos and rentals flanked on both sides by old broken buildings, including several hospitals, which afforded the island an above-average population of people affected by paraplegia and/or amputated limbs. The only way to get to Roosevelt Island from Manhattan, where everyone else lived, was by catching the aerial tramway at 59th Street and 2nd Avenue.

On 59th Street and 3rd Avenue was Bloomingdale's, is there still -- when I go for hand therapy or to meet Bruce for lunch, I take the 4 train uptown and get out at the store exit and walk through it, from Lex to 3rd. They've remodeled many times in thirty years, made it trickier to get upstairs from the lower level, but I recognize the old bones, the old smell. The dazzling black and white and silver Versailles that greeted you -- ten, eleven years old -- greets you still (or greets me, anyway; who are we kidding with this you); the deeply chemical effect of the perfume, like poppers, and the slim, composed women who bent down to you, nurse-like, and daubed your blue veins with alcohol.

I was too young to wear makeup, but the ponytailed women behind the makeup counters would be happy to sell me soap, Clinique, in its own avocado-colored sliding plastic cover that seemed so perfect an object as to render all other objects frumpy. The women didn't discourage me from swiping my fingers along the mossy eyeshadows, or striping lipsticks in the hollow of my treasured thumb. Basically, I figured out quickly that I could kill a lot of time in the makeup department of Bloomingdales without attracting too much attention; that I could pee in the bathroom on the second floor if I needed to, instead of being caught needing to on the tram; that people behind the counters would sometimes shoot me condescending smiles, which are better than no smiles at all.

Then, stepping through towards 3rd, you ("you") were past makeup and perfume and you were suddenly in the men's department, a cozy marigold-and-dark-wood study for the headless, sweatered torsos between the racks; neckties, handkerchiefs, everything very reasonable and sane. It's like you sat down like Eloise on mommy's posh dressing tuffet in front of her magic mirror, and then wandered into daddy's tobacco scented walk-in closet; like you were lost in a rich, comfortable forest of propriety and goodwill. 

Then out onto the street, onto the tram, onto the Roosevelt Island bus, and home. And as soon as I could, out the door again. I started getting to school an hour early, sitting and waiting on the steps for my classmate Chris Lewis, who sometimes came early, especially as he found me there early more often; then for everyone else to arrive. Sometimes I walked down 3rd Avenue to school to kill time, walked around Irving Square Park, through pigeons and indigent men, pretending things. After school I could walk up to B. Altman's on Fifth Avenue and get sprayed by perfume and play with makeup and ride the escalators up and down. Play grown-up. I had an idea about a movie about a plucky outcast genius girl who walked around New York City a lot; she cut through department stores when it rained and kind of smiled to herself about it, and that showed you both her resourcefulness and her bemused take on life's painful exigencies.

On the fourth floor of Bloomingdales was where my mother had bought me the Snoopy suitcase, which I used to commute to my father's for three weekends out of four, though mostly my mother preferred to browse at Bloomie's, then steer me across the street to Alexander's, which was "every bit as good." By eleven, twelve, I was getting a little old for the Snoopy suitcase. I'd started borrowing my mother's high heeled boots, on days when I could get her to leave the house before me; she had two pair, one eggplant and one pumpkin, and whichever one she didn't wear, with her kicky plaid wrap-around skirt with the braided and wood-beaded belt, I would appropriate, to wear over my dungarees. These I would wear to department stores around town, fancying that everyone who saw me on the elevators was well impressed by my woeful, wise look, my preternatural maturity. 

Someone asked me recently if I was worried about becoming schizophrenic. No, I said, but I could definitely become a shopaholic. I'm already a browseaholic, always ducking through, just passing by, doing errands in the neighborhood, happening to be early for a meeting and such; no thanks, just looking, carrying an item around and around, trying things on that don't fit. A few weeks ago a young saleswoman at Barney's Co-Op squinted at me in recognition and asked, You live here, right?, and I didn't know if she meant the neighborhood of Chelsea or Barney's Co-Op. 

It was the antechamber between the twin terrors of school and home, a place I took for granted and still do, and now, when the women want to catch me by the wrist and tell me about anti-aging, I wish they could tell me about anti-regressing instead.

Ou est la plume de ma sante

My cat is putting on his winter coat.
The heat is hissing like we thought
we'd never need again, and I'm sad
to watch it turn so early black. Yesterday
I talked my family out of a kidnapping;
keep me, I said, in the native tongue,
and my spine was straight, willing to be broken.
I keep packing my suitcase, wanting
to know the time, checking again,
every window shows a different face.
Now I'm fiending on the roof, explaining
electricity to her in my head. Old homes,
school stairways, the bath at the top of the landing;
all the sugar cubes my night horse feeds,
invisible as it gallops, like a girl down the hallway.
The kaleidoscope turns, stained glass shards
ground to sand, weathered like a bottle thrown to sea.
The message doesn't matter anymore.

Last week's notebook

7:15 on a Friday night, we're so old that we already ate dinner at the diner around the corner, where a couple had two children under the age of three, one of whom was barfing white fluid from its face and crying, so why didn’t they take him out of the restaurant? Why in the world did they linger, and let the child barf and cry, and not have one of the adults take the child away from the restaurant full of people trying to eat? And then the guy picked a fight with the waitress about something he felt he’d been overcharged for, and the kid threw up some more, and then Dad made the manager bring the ice cream tub from the freezer to show him that it was Haagen Dazs and not some child poison brand, and I hated them so much, so so much that if I wasn’t on my meds I would have been losing my mind. I would have said something, and part of the reason I didn’t was because I’m medicated, but partially because there was a table of cops right behind them, and I could easily see the husband and then the cops turning on me for telling the woman to take her barfing, crying baby outside, because cops are still mostly suspect to me.

Rage. Still there, underneath. But I am at least fifty percent less enraged these days, these days when I sleep for ten hours at a time, wake up, eat oatmeal, and lay back down. I feel like I’m trading furious for tired right now, and I’ll take tired. I feel like I’m a notoriously angry person, like I’ve embarrassed myself publicly so many times, shot myself in the foot. I was putting on lipstick today, trying to do it so it stays on, starting with this cotton candy flavored lip scrub to scuff off the ragged flesh I get from biting my lips, then using a pencil, lipstick brush, powder layer, another layer with the brush, and it’s no use, it looks gloppy and uneven, and I’m 41 years old, and I’m trying so hard not to be, with my tight t-shirts and jeans, and it’s just ridiculous. Bill came into the bathroom and I said, “I’m twenty-four! I’m twenty-four years old!” And he shook his head, not meanly, but definitively, side to side. No, you’re not.

Why that age, he asked, when I’d finally wiped off the lipstick and was ready to go. Why would you want to be twenty-four? Wasn’t that the worst of it? Yeah, almost. Twenty-five was the big one, the life changing one; twenty four was still the dark ages – thumbsucking, self-abuse, threatening everyone around me with suicide, shrinkless; so angry, so guilty, so full of shame. How I lay on the floor on 8th Avenue and wept, and the cats came over and nudged me, get up. But man, you should have seen me at twenty-four. The abs on me! The tits! The attitude! Diva! I quit Pussy Poets, I performed at Woodstock, I almost got arrested in Detroit for performing my poem “The Slut of Pascack Valley High” over an amplified sound system at Lollapalooza. (Leans on cane.) I tell you, I ushed to be somebody!

Ah, but today. I shot myself in the foot so hard at Lollapalooza, it hurts to talk about how many opportunities I blew back then, how grateful I am for the opportunities I still have.

Wait, Bill is talking to me. He does this sometimes, when I’m writing, and I’m like, ech hem. Writing here.

So, shooting yourself in the foot. I want to go back to twenty-four and make the right decisions this time. I’m willing to write off everything before that age as character building; god knows I wouldn’t take back leaving home, because then I’d have no shtick! But I want to re-do twenty-four, I want that body, that energy, that anger, frankly, which while it totally fucked me up, also drove me much harder than I drive myself these days. Which is not very far, in circles, etc., cliché, self-deprecation, milky vomit from a toddler’s gullet, aka, this post.