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18 September 2006 : an inauspicious ending; part 6 of 6.
you're really never lucky enough to be given foresight about the end of a friendship. sure, you know when someone you've trusted has broken that trust and you must choose to let them go - but i would not call that luck. i'm talking about those relationships that just...end. not because you wanted them to, or didn't care, but due to some circumstance outside yourself that you neither understood nor could control.
but i firmly believe that sometimes frienships are forged out of what i can't quite call convienence, but something close to it. necessity, circumstance.
that's how this one worked. he was fresh in town from austin. i was fresh in town from san francisco. we were hired at the same restaurant over the same week by the same man for the same rate of pay.
it took me a few days to notice. it was the day i left my wallet two hours away and didn't notice until halfway to work with maybe a gallon of gas left in my tank. i turned around and was reunited with my money by some undeserved miracle, not running out of fuel on the freeway or in the middle of an unfamiliar city. when i finally rushed into work, the supervisor and all the employees were running a pool to see whether or not i got stranded. and this stranger was totally in on it.
that night, i wiped icing off a counter as he vacuumed the carpets and quizzed me about my musical interests. "what's in your cd player right now?"
i don't remember my answer, but it was september of 2003 so my two best guesses are remy zero's villa elaine or counting crow's recovering the satellites.
he was nice. i didn't see this coming. as far as i was concerned, i was destined to be alone forever. i had been permanently abandoned, un-chosen as i've said before. i had just abandoned the life i'd declared loudly and publicly to be "perfection!" because it had been hollow and disappointing, and had come dangerously close to killing me.
but he asked me to come over and dye his hair. persistently. finally after a shared shift one evening we drove to the apartment he shared with his parents and i stood over him in the bathroom rubbing black goo onto his skull. that was pretty much it.
i'd say it was about six months. he was everywhere i was. i was everywhere he was. it wasn't the kind of relationship i used to gloat about as an adolescent, we didn't sip expensive coffees and talk about important things, there was no soul baring. we went to movies, we ate dinner. he made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt. he helped me move (twice). he was smart and quick and said the most ridiculous things. he listened to beautiful music and then gave it to me.
it was fall, and then winter. my failures on the west coast didn't matter so much. he was my best friend. i was happy.
looking back, i know it really ended with the girl. she was suddenly there, and i understood why he liked her so much. i understood why she liked him so much. i was happy for them - he was my best friend, and i liked her too. but suddenly he didn't have time for me, suddenly there was too much going on. i spent more time with her than i did with him. i left that job for something marginally better, moved about twenty minutes away. saw him only by appointment, direct request. things were different now - i had school, i had other friends. he had school, he had his new girlfriend.
they broke up maybe two years later. he sat drinking coffee with me one night and told me point blank, "she didn't want me to hang out with you. she thought i was closer to you than i was to her."
i was stunned, though maybe i shouldn't have been. but i was friends with both of them - close enough to her that she should have known i had no interest in her boyfriend. i'd been friends with him a long time before she even existed in our lives, and i hadn't been interested then - why would that change?
and the worst part was not that she passed the edict. the worst part was that he followed it. i wanted him to have been stronger than that, more than i wanted her not to be that kind of girl. i couldn't place the blame solely on her, the party about whom i cared less - i had to acknowledge that he was the one with the power to hurt me, and he had to bear some responsibility.
that's when i stopped trying. didn't really call all that often, and tried to fight the urge when it came. i'm a busy girl, i have a lot of friends. i didn't need him anymore.
but circumstance, necessity - they can't explain it all. i still miss him, to this day i miss him. i haven't in the past three years met anyone who could make me laugh quite like he did. and i wish i'd had the foresight to know this was happening. but it tiptoed quietly under the radar that had been pushed aside by my overflowing calendar and never said a word.
two weeks ago when i called, just to ask him to have a few beers on saturday night, he broke the news. "i'm moving to chicago next week." swore up and down that he'd told me before, but i knew it wasn't true.
i was a little sad, but only a little. see, chicago is only a three hour drive. if it mattered, i could drive to see him no question. but it wouldn't matter. the move may as well have been symbolic, because i could cite at least three hours distance between us even at 12 miles. he'd been gone for a long time.
but he was there when i needed him the most - he was the perfect answer to what i needed in those dark days right after i came home from california. and i'll always remember that.
so i'm taking the high road tonight and forgiving everything between then and now, and saying just this:
i'll keep missing you like i've missed you already, bud.
i hope you knock them on their asses.
posted by lindsay at 23:13 :: 2 comments
05 September 2006 : which road to el dorado; part 5 of 6
her name was carolina and she was the prettiest girl in the sixth grade.
i don't think anyone but me ever noticed - because her clothes were shabby and outdated, everyone looked right over her. i was grateful that this was what they cared about, patent leather and brand names, because it meant that i would have less competition. she would be my friend, i would make certain of it. i just didn't know how.
i first saw her in the cafeteria. it took me a long time to figure out that her dark skin and wide eyes and broad cheekbones meant that she was the child of migrant workers, in school only during the fall and gone after christmas, never to be seen again. she wasn't like the rest of the girls who talked loudly to one another in spanish and laughed when you walked by and couldn't understand what they said.
i knew why they stuck together; you can walk the entirety of tipton county and never encounter a person of color. that's probably for the best - i'm always tempted to warn away those i do see. "trust me, you don't want to be here. someone's going to be ignorant and mean in your direction before the hour's out." and sixth grade, well, i don't have to tell you how vicious sixth grade is. factor out an unusual skin color, a migrant background and citizenship. you're still left crying in the bathroom during free period.
but carolina, she wasn't like the rest of the girls. she sat alone at lunch reading books and didn't flirt with the boys, she didn't go to the basketball games or hang cheerful posters in the cafeteria. she was like me. but i was afraid of her, like i was afraid of everyone in 1994.
it was a miracle when we changed from art class to music class in the middle of october. i was waiting for class to start having arrived minutes before the bell, not caring to linger in the halls where the boys would make fun of my weight. when carolina came in, she stood looking around the room while everyone ignored her and then headed for the empty seat at my table. i was sharing it with the stack of ms. fredericks' books and papers, and andrew brown (who was the janitor's son and a smartass but not in a funny way, so nobody liked him).
i sat and jiggled my leg and bit at my nails and tried to look cool, sneaking peeks at her over the top of my geography workbook. she was completely calm and unaware of everyone else, a quality i admired (and still do). i wanted to be nonchalant. andrew brown babbled through class like he always did and always would, annoying because i thought he was supposed to be. i hated him, and i hated that he talked to carolina and she talked back to him like it was the easiest thing in the world. she understood that he was a outcast though, and kept her answers to a minimum.
but andrew brown, he rattled on and on over his workbook, talking about mexico as though he knew all about it. i pretended to fill out the blanks on the page in front of me, while dreaming of ways to shut him up. if i was clever enough, carolina and i would be giggling over our paperbacks in a corner of the lunch room before the end of the week. her skin was so beautiful. i wanted to know what it was like in mexico, and if she had to work with her parents on the weekends. i wanted to know if she went to school all the time, or just sometimes. i wanted sleepovers and summer trips to chiapas, i wanted it all.
finally, i couldn't take it anymore. andrew brown was talking too much, and it was offensive the way he kept talking about mexico as though carolina weren't sitting right next to him, knowing more than he would ever know (even at age 11 my sense of justice and empathy was overwhelming to a fault). and he was pronouncing mexico all wrong, like he was making fun of her. i was furious with him for being so insensitive.
"shut up!" i said. "stop saying 'mexico' like that, it sounds stupid!" i slapped both hands down on the table, righteously. i would defend her honor, her foreignness.
andrew stared at me. ms. fredericks stared at me. carolina stared at me, with fire in her eyes. i was avenging her, she would love me forever, write me letters with exotic stamps i could cut out and paste in my photo album. the moment lasted forever, and then it happened.
carolina opened her mouth and spoke to me for the very first time.
"that's how you're supposed to say it," she told me calmly. "it's not stupid." andrew brown bent whistling over his notebook. ms. fredericks hid a smile behind her hand and tried hard to look like she hadn't overhead. carolina glared at me like i was the one who was being rude.
i blushed furiously through the bus ride home, burning with humiliation over my mistake. how could i explain to her that i was protecting her? that i wanted her to ride home on the bus with me, and we could play computer games together and check each other's homework. there were no words. she sat at a different table the next day.
carolina didn't come back after christmas break, and i never saw her again. that year, i used a swear word for the first time and started asking my mom for brand name clothes and expensive shampoos, but i never forgot about carolina and how badly i wanted to be her best friend forever. and how much it hurt that my intentions were misconstrued.
sometimes i can't help but wonder if that rainy fall day in the music room isn't the reason i am becoming an anthropologist.
posted by lindsay at 22:08 :: 2 comments
26 August 2006 : sighted; part 4 of 6
her abdomen proceeds her as she makes her way down the sidewalk, stepping carefully past cracks and shoots of green. from a distance, though you can tell she is a large woman, the bowl of her belly does not conform to ideas of obesity. instead, to the eye of an interested amateur (my eye, see), it looks as though perhaps she's suffering from malnutrion, from kwashiorkor. you've seen them, the children with the swollen bellies, a skinny little boy looking like nothing more than pregnant in the circle of sally struthers' arms.
this protrusion is given many explanations, among them swollen liver due to cirrhosis or simple fluid retention for any number of nasty reasons. i can't help but wonder if it's not about more than anatomy, more than disease.
the bones that form the pelvic girdle are thick and strong, fitted perfectly to form a cup with wings that extend up the back. they shifted and swayed this way and that as we stood upright. their mass is intended for strength, to stand up under the impossible responsibility of cradling human organs. the muscles that attach them, too, are thick and broad - muscles that will not easily tear. some mornings, surely, you've stopped to consider what keeps you upright with no thought to physiology, the miracle that is your body.
i don't question this anymore, because i know the bones and their perfection. i know what works with what, and why each movement is a choreographed ballet of sinew and socket. i could fall to my knees before such perfect machinery, fall to worship at the altar of human flesh. this is nothing about love, romantic love or sex, nothing about desire.
it is about abstractions and waking up every morning knowing this: i have two feet, and a heart that beats.
i would only be able to express my feeling for a perfectly created machine in a language normally reserved for words on god. how easy it is to take for granted existence and how easy to abuse what is given you, how the assurance of youth is to be immortal.
i have heard theorized that man's machines are a sort of proof of god, of a flawless designer whose time is best spent building blueprints - hiding them subtly - so that man could reproduce them in plastic, in machines. i see no such connection.
the click of a shutter. the blink of an eye. the perfect designs of our bodies reflected as it should be in the material world. the existence of a camera does not give me faith in anything but that maybe once existed someone else who felt as i do. humanness is a gift not bestowed benign among the bushes of a humble beginning, but a gift of discovery, something we gave ourselves in a triumphant emergence from the forest.
congratulations men. you see blue sky and the ripple of muscle.
the ilium, the ischium, the pubis. a holy trinity i can get behind.
and i wonder if this distension of abdomen isn't about giving up. maybe the muscles of her stomach could no longer handle the strain of being upright. maybe they let go the strain of holding themselves together. maybe getting out of bed will soon no longer be worth the trouble.
it is a day of perfections. the woman walks with a white stick, tapping tapping her way down washington street. she smiles, and i smile at the grandeur of my assumed knowledge. normally my first instinct would be sadness, that she would not see the distinction of vivid blue sky and vibrant green grass, black asphalt and white cloud, the greens and oranges of corroded buildings, all the beautiful things of this world we made.
but i among all people should know that something does not cease to be beautiful when you close your eyes, nor does it begin to be beautiful only because they're open. the wind blows softly down johnson avenue, and her belly proceeds her as she makes her way down the sidewalk, feeling on her face the light of perfect day.
posted by lindsay at 15:36 :: 2 comments
23 August 2006 : the snap judgment; part 3 of 6
4am
heat is radiating from every square inch of skin. i wonder, if there were enough light to see by, that i might not be releasing steam. it's the heat of a healing wound; my entire body has become an injury against the night. i couldn't say about the cause. it could be the whiskey i'm sipping straight from the bottle. it could be that i haven't eaten in 36 hours, during which i've had four hours of sleep. it could be the conversation. it could be too many cigarettes.
it's only been a few days since i sat on this porch and said to shari, "i just need to meet someone to be excited about. i need to make a new friend." i have no illusions about the man sitting next to me; probably i'll never see him again. i have no intentions for the man sitting next to me; if i made a move, either outcome could probably ensure that he'd never be back. but i like that he is new and i like that he is here, and he listens like everything i say is worth hearing.
12am
things are winding down at the theater. it's my favorite time of night, when everyone has filtered out save the staff and the bands, the lights are up and the floors have been cleared of couches, of equipment, of the swaying crowd of 20 somethings.
it's an old theater; the floor declines from the soundbooth to the stage, with nothing but a few old snags of bolt to interrupt a streamlined process. our chairs, they all have wheels. those without backs are the best, they move more quickly and offer less resistance. it feels like tradition as we line up against the raised platform on which rests the soundboard, prepare to push off for an audience and race to the bottom. i know what is coming, but each time i scream and giggle in tandem, thinking i'll hit a hole and tumble forward or stop too late, stop with my face.
i reach the stage last, but am unscathed by my loss. it is a hot, humid night and the rush of stale air against my face is enough to make me smile. i am full of an incongruous delight, the same that faces me at the end of each night i spend here. sometimes it is the music itself, a reminder that there are still people who create beautiful things for beautiful things' sake. sometimes it is the people i've met, or simply the taste of good coffee. tonight it is all of those things, my body responding to a freedom it had been craving through the duration of five stressful days. my head and everything below it were rioting against each other, looting and throwing homemade bombs around in loopy anger. nothing in my being had paused to say thank you for days.
i return to the top of the theater by pushing my legs, sandals sliding against the smooth concrete but even uphill and without traction i make good time. behind me someone yells "watch out!" but i do not turn around quickly enough to avoid collision with the man standing behind me. he halts my progress by putting hands on either side of my chair. my physical surprise should, but does not, prevent me from thinking quickly. he bends his face to my ear to mock me playfully for losing the race, and i lean my head back against him - partly for the thrill of feeling my long hair catch against his stubbled cheeks and partly so he will be able to get a nice, long breath of me. i know how good i smell.
it's so brief it almost hasn't happened, but something has changed here. and this is all i'll allow myself, this brief moment of contact.
8pm
i sit behind the table that serves as concessions with a book open in front of me, waiting for music to start, waiting to stamp hands should someone venture through the door. it's still beautiful daylight outside, no sign of the swelter that will mark the evening to come and i sit warmed by the sunlight as i read. i've worked maybe six shows but my instincts are already sharp, and the slight change in shadow makes me look up from the words on the page. he walks in tentatively, looks around and heads to me, asks "do you work here?"
i tell him where he can park and put his equipment, trying not to stare and trying not to be rude. there's something about him - tshirt so thin it may as well not be there, five or six days unshaven, long hair curling around his face. i have him pegged immediately, which says more about me than i'd like to admit. oversexed rock god, is what i think. this guy's gonna be a complete douchebag. he's barely as tall as i am, a fact i won't notice until several hours later when i realize that facing him, his eyes are at...eye level. he's larger than life, and i am unfair. the preceding days have left me feeling unwanted and unworthy, and it's my insecurities - admittedly few - that judge this stranger more than anything else.
but no matter my intellectual understanding; i am on the prowl tonight, for what i'm not entirely sure. i am full of prideful frustration and unspent agression and looking to disabuse myself of all this negativity. the moment, my fight-or-flight response to being intimidated by something i can't have, passes quickly but the feeling remains. i forget about him, dismiss it all and return to my book, all 400 pages of which i will read sitting outside the front doors while four bands play inside to my distracted ears.
one of these days, i'll learn to be grateful for these things that come along just when i need them, rather than being angry that each moment is fleeting. one of these days i'll stop imposing. in my adolescent anger, i moved too quickly and upon being proven wrong i was completely disarmed. situation normal: i'm an asshole.
posted by lindsay at 23:57 :: 1 comments
21 August 2006 : the imagined hazard of watching; part 2 of 6
she was not a young woman, but she carried the baby on her hip as though it belonged to her. she carried the baby on her hip as though it had once lived and fed among the soft pink tissues of her body. i studied it as well as i could from this distance, wrapped in a blue cloth whose intensity fought for dominance with the sky, and wondered if she lived well inside of it, or if it were a losing battle against time. the details were fuzzy at this distance, but age - hers and the baby's - she carried well.
i smiled at her furtive, quizzical glances from where i sat in a soft scrabble of sand, holding my book and sipping precious bottled water too warm for home but delicious in the necessity created by the incessant heat of being here. my feet would dangle of the edge of the cliff, too far from the ocean to feel its spray, for several hours but she would never respond to my advances.
it could have been my skin, so white in the light of day except where it was burnt pink from the same. or it could have been my clothes, shabby and secondhand though they were, bursting with songs about the world i came from which we both knew was about as far from hers as intangible distance allows. my tshirt with its holes and my jeans with their frayed seams were still different, nicer somehow, than anything she could have laid hands on. i doubted she would want to, envying the way the wind ruffled up underneath her skirts and must even as i watched be laying soft hands against the smooth skin of her thighs.
maybe it was the men nearby.
her men, they had to be. men rough and drunken and possibly disapproving of any contact with me. i watched disappointed but never found the courage to stand and bridge the gap between where i sat with one foot looped in my bag strap for safety and the child beat awkward searching hands against the sand. the men - long grass, they would be called - were behind us several hundred yards in the shade of a picnic shelter but their presence, like i'd come to realize about most strange men, was electrifying in its pervasion.
i sat in my disappointment for what felt like hours, craving the feeling of that little girl's eyes on me, the smooth skin as yet unscarred by whatever hard work her life would be. plane rides and gambling, relinquished paychecks, liquor, petrol, the racism she would take for granted by grace of birth. i wanted that baby, wanted to taste her as pure and undiluted, another young possiblity. she could be one who broke the endless cycle of heartbreak, of thievery, of disuse. she could sweep into the streets the dust of empty, disheveled lives.
it was my own heart that was breaking, that day i sat reading on the cliff. where the trees failed to shade me, the sun beat against my back and my legs. i was acutely aware of these things: the crease between thigh and buttock, the bend of a knee, a downed upper lip, the bridge of my nose. cool points to take pleasure in against the heat of my body.
i watched hungrily the woman and the baby without ever swallowing what it was that held me back, two decades of my mother's voice in my ear, telling me never to talk to strangers, her fear when i told her i would span continents alone. the woman and her baby were safe enough, she would suppose, but what about the men?
what about them? did i fear their distinct foreignness, or that they were clearly intoxicated on an early sunday afternoon? why could i not leave my book behind and lay a hand on that little girl's brow? i would never know, because i would never try. the woman continued to glance back at me, but i returned to my book and hoped for the best of possible futures for all of them. my work was to study, not interfere. the trials of an anthropologist in training. somewhere compassion ends and observation begins. my guess is that i could find some etymological link between emperical and imperial, and it would allow for night after sleepless night.
behind us a man walked barefoot in a purple tshirt that hurt my eyes in the contrast to his skin, burnished to the bare shine of a roasted coffee bean. he wandered through the park a little dumbfounded, cupped hands held to his mouth as he shouted the inexplicable, "sean connery!" over and over again. his accent was so thick, so broad that i felt it slide down the back of my throat and thought i would never be able to stretch open my white-girl jaws to accomodate it. i would be forever meek.
i felt nothing but self loathing as i wrapped my foot more tightly in the strap of my bag and turned back to an afternoon of dispassionate reading, black words on a white page describing the plight of the people whose true stories walked all around me.
posted by lindsay at 22:58 :: 0 comments
16 August 2006 : jeans and t-shirt girl: part 1 of 6
I haven't always been a jeans and t-shirt girl.
There was definitely a long period of time somewhere in there (think, birth - 10 yrs) where I wore pretty much nothing but pink, and most of my outfits matched completely. My favorite was this: pale pink oxford with slightly darker pink sweater-vest and even darker pink corduroy pants. This was still the early eighties, so believe me when I tell you that there was some serious flaring at the bottom of those cords.
Dad and Grandpa tried to fix it, in vain - dressed me in their t-shirts mostly, so I would toddle around on the sidewalk outside the house in a navy blue number that read "LOCAL 151" in white block letters larger than my entire body.
In the third grade I gave up on pink a little. At this point I was reading at college level and sneaking Sweet Valley University home from the public library in my backpack (book #2, Love, Lies, and Jessica Wakefield featured on it's cover Jessica Wakefield and a dashing young man with floppy nineties hair wearing only bathrobes and smiling at each other in the bathroom mirror - my mother considered this FAR too risque for her youngest child and only daughter). My favorite outfit that year was a pair of capri length spandex bicycle pants, black with a neon pink stripe on either side and a black t-shirt covered in glitter and splatter paint hearts: pink, blue, green.
I was in. I was watching what the other girls wore, sneaking a 12-color eyeshadow palette into the bathroom at school in the morning, scrunching my socks down over the tops of my sneakers. I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to wear silk shirts and pinch roll my jeans (these options were denied me until the fifth grade, when mom relented and bought me both).
Enter 1997. My freshman year of high school saw me entering a particularly vicious world. Tipton High School, with it's overwhelming population of 500 students in four classes, would never be kind to me. And I was fourteen, that worst of roughshot adolescent ages for a girl. My father had died four months before, and my two older brothers had left imprinted on every wall and locker a legacy of cool that couldn't possibly be upheld by the shy third child, sulking in a corner and scribbling angry poems in a red notebook. You should understand about Central Indiana that we follow the coastal trends at a leisurely pace (surely influenced by confusion over daylight savings time and a need to ensure the corn was in fact knee high by july 4th), and so things like Courtney Love and ball-chains had only just entered my worldview.
I learned to apply black eyeliner and wore to school every day a pair of drab green cloth pants whose bottoms measured 54 inches in circumference, but could be cinched by a drawstring for maximum skateboarding ease (I never skated, but oh did I love the boys who did - I still kind of do). I was listening to X103 - Indy's New Rock Alternative! - as a matter of course, because I couldn't claim street cred without knowing all the words to The Verve Pipe's "The Freshman" or Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug," a song I still love.
In geometry class, I was staring longingly at the back of Bryan Small's closely shorn blonde head, surreptitiously displaying my perfect test grades in case he wanted a tutor. He had offered me a warm hand on a cold playground one day in winter, two years my senior yet not embarrassed to play Red Rover at my side, and spent two years unfailingly not noticing my presence until the first day of my freshman year when he looked me up and down in my green skater pants and black eyeliner, gave me a curt nod of acknowledgement and walked on. He wore a Sebadoh shirt to school one momentous day and the next afternoon I drove a half hour to the nearest music shop (Sam Goody in the Kokomo Mall) and bought a Sebadoh album for myself. I listened to it religiously for six months before realizing that a) I was terrified of his girlfriend and wanted nothing of this crush to become public, cause bitch would KICK MY ASS and b) I was saving myself for Gavin Rossdale. I let the pants rot in the back of my closet and concentrated instead on wearing as much black as humanly possible.
I went through a few more phases between then and now - one most notably recorded by my friend Bobby who, senior year of high school dressed up like me and pulled it off with glorious accuracy (this was during the: wear as many colors as possible at once phase), complete with a name tag that read something along the lines of "I am Lindsay. I think Doug is in love with me." But Bryan Small, he was the beginning of the end. And each of those regrettable clothing phases was sincerely punctuated by the ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt. In fact, my closet is bulging because I haven't stopped wearing pretty much anything I bought past the age of sixteen. Because no matter how many days in a row I wore those green pants with my Airwalks, no matter how thick I laid on the eyeliner or how many test questions I let him copy, he wasn't going to be into me.
Thus I realized, eventually and only partially, that a woman is not what she wears. A hard idea to shake in this society that I live in, but at the very least, the kind of woman I hope I am is not what she wears. I wear my jeans (yes, dark and flared and tight) with pride, and my 3 for 7.99$ black A-frames without irony because they're comfortable and I feel sexy when I'm not parading, a point driven home the other night when I realized that I swing my hips in a particular pair of well fitted jeans but stumble uncomfortably in anything that could be considered "business casual" or dressier. It throws me off, makes me fumble for my words. I can't eat or drink through lipstick, and I'll suffocate my cat before squeezing into anything in the stocking family.
I bought that Sebadoh album again a couple of years ago and loved it - it's good stuff, music I'll put my word behind. And so far, my least complicated, most tenderly passionate and enduring relationship has been with black eyeliner. I think you have to admit that all the coolest girls have a gimmick.
posted by lindsay at 21:02 :: 4 comments
you're really never lucky enough to be given foresight about the end of a friendship. sure, you know when someone you've trusted has broken that trust and you must choose to let them go - but i would not call that luck. i'm talking about those relationships that just...end. not because you wanted them to, or didn't care, but due to some circumstance outside yourself that you neither understood nor could control.
but i firmly believe that sometimes frienships are forged out of what i can't quite call convienence, but something close to it. necessity, circumstance.
that's how this one worked. he was fresh in town from austin. i was fresh in town from san francisco. we were hired at the same restaurant over the same week by the same man for the same rate of pay.
it took me a few days to notice. it was the day i left my wallet two hours away and didn't notice until halfway to work with maybe a gallon of gas left in my tank. i turned around and was reunited with my money by some undeserved miracle, not running out of fuel on the freeway or in the middle of an unfamiliar city. when i finally rushed into work, the supervisor and all the employees were running a pool to see whether or not i got stranded. and this stranger was totally in on it.
that night, i wiped icing off a counter as he vacuumed the carpets and quizzed me about my musical interests. "what's in your cd player right now?"
i don't remember my answer, but it was september of 2003 so my two best guesses are remy zero's villa elaine or counting crow's recovering the satellites.
he was nice. i didn't see this coming. as far as i was concerned, i was destined to be alone forever. i had been permanently abandoned, un-chosen as i've said before. i had just abandoned the life i'd declared loudly and publicly to be "perfection!" because it had been hollow and disappointing, and had come dangerously close to killing me.
but he asked me to come over and dye his hair. persistently. finally after a shared shift one evening we drove to the apartment he shared with his parents and i stood over him in the bathroom rubbing black goo onto his skull. that was pretty much it.
i'd say it was about six months. he was everywhere i was. i was everywhere he was. it wasn't the kind of relationship i used to gloat about as an adolescent, we didn't sip expensive coffees and talk about important things, there was no soul baring. we went to movies, we ate dinner. he made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt. he helped me move (twice). he was smart and quick and said the most ridiculous things. he listened to beautiful music and then gave it to me.
it was fall, and then winter. my failures on the west coast didn't matter so much. he was my best friend. i was happy.
looking back, i know it really ended with the girl. she was suddenly there, and i understood why he liked her so much. i understood why she liked him so much. i was happy for them - he was my best friend, and i liked her too. but suddenly he didn't have time for me, suddenly there was too much going on. i spent more time with her than i did with him. i left that job for something marginally better, moved about twenty minutes away. saw him only by appointment, direct request. things were different now - i had school, i had other friends. he had school, he had his new girlfriend.
they broke up maybe two years later. he sat drinking coffee with me one night and told me point blank, "she didn't want me to hang out with you. she thought i was closer to you than i was to her."
i was stunned, though maybe i shouldn't have been. but i was friends with both of them - close enough to her that she should have known i had no interest in her boyfriend. i'd been friends with him a long time before she even existed in our lives, and i hadn't been interested then - why would that change?
and the worst part was not that she passed the edict. the worst part was that he followed it. i wanted him to have been stronger than that, more than i wanted her not to be that kind of girl. i couldn't place the blame solely on her, the party about whom i cared less - i had to acknowledge that he was the one with the power to hurt me, and he had to bear some responsibility.
that's when i stopped trying. didn't really call all that often, and tried to fight the urge when it came. i'm a busy girl, i have a lot of friends. i didn't need him anymore.
but circumstance, necessity - they can't explain it all. i still miss him, to this day i miss him. i haven't in the past three years met anyone who could make me laugh quite like he did. and i wish i'd had the foresight to know this was happening. but it tiptoed quietly under the radar that had been pushed aside by my overflowing calendar and never said a word.
two weeks ago when i called, just to ask him to have a few beers on saturday night, he broke the news. "i'm moving to chicago next week." swore up and down that he'd told me before, but i knew it wasn't true.
i was a little sad, but only a little. see, chicago is only a three hour drive. if it mattered, i could drive to see him no question. but it wouldn't matter. the move may as well have been symbolic, because i could cite at least three hours distance between us even at 12 miles. he'd been gone for a long time.
but he was there when i needed him the most - he was the perfect answer to what i needed in those dark days right after i came home from california. and i'll always remember that.
so i'm taking the high road tonight and forgiving everything between then and now, and saying just this:
i'll keep missing you like i've missed you already, bud.
i hope you knock them on their asses.
posted by lindsay at 23:13 :: 2 comments
05 September 2006 : which road to el dorado; part 5 of 6
her name was carolina and she was the prettiest girl in the sixth grade.
i don't think anyone but me ever noticed - because her clothes were shabby and outdated, everyone looked right over her. i was grateful that this was what they cared about, patent leather and brand names, because it meant that i would have less competition. she would be my friend, i would make certain of it. i just didn't know how.
i first saw her in the cafeteria. it took me a long time to figure out that her dark skin and wide eyes and broad cheekbones meant that she was the child of migrant workers, in school only during the fall and gone after christmas, never to be seen again. she wasn't like the rest of the girls who talked loudly to one another in spanish and laughed when you walked by and couldn't understand what they said.
i knew why they stuck together; you can walk the entirety of tipton county and never encounter a person of color. that's probably for the best - i'm always tempted to warn away those i do see. "trust me, you don't want to be here. someone's going to be ignorant and mean in your direction before the hour's out." and sixth grade, well, i don't have to tell you how vicious sixth grade is. factor out an unusual skin color, a migrant background and citizenship. you're still left crying in the bathroom during free period.
but carolina, she wasn't like the rest of the girls. she sat alone at lunch reading books and didn't flirt with the boys, she didn't go to the basketball games or hang cheerful posters in the cafeteria. she was like me. but i was afraid of her, like i was afraid of everyone in 1994.
it was a miracle when we changed from art class to music class in the middle of october. i was waiting for class to start having arrived minutes before the bell, not caring to linger in the halls where the boys would make fun of my weight. when carolina came in, she stood looking around the room while everyone ignored her and then headed for the empty seat at my table. i was sharing it with the stack of ms. fredericks' books and papers, and andrew brown (who was the janitor's son and a smartass but not in a funny way, so nobody liked him).
i sat and jiggled my leg and bit at my nails and tried to look cool, sneaking peeks at her over the top of my geography workbook. she was completely calm and unaware of everyone else, a quality i admired (and still do). i wanted to be nonchalant. andrew brown babbled through class like he always did and always would, annoying because i thought he was supposed to be. i hated him, and i hated that he talked to carolina and she talked back to him like it was the easiest thing in the world. she understood that he was a outcast though, and kept her answers to a minimum.
but andrew brown, he rattled on and on over his workbook, talking about mexico as though he knew all about it. i pretended to fill out the blanks on the page in front of me, while dreaming of ways to shut him up. if i was clever enough, carolina and i would be giggling over our paperbacks in a corner of the lunch room before the end of the week. her skin was so beautiful. i wanted to know what it was like in mexico, and if she had to work with her parents on the weekends. i wanted to know if she went to school all the time, or just sometimes. i wanted sleepovers and summer trips to chiapas, i wanted it all.
finally, i couldn't take it anymore. andrew brown was talking too much, and it was offensive the way he kept talking about mexico as though carolina weren't sitting right next to him, knowing more than he would ever know (even at age 11 my sense of justice and empathy was overwhelming to a fault). and he was pronouncing mexico all wrong, like he was making fun of her. i was furious with him for being so insensitive.
"shut up!" i said. "stop saying 'mexico' like that, it sounds stupid!" i slapped both hands down on the table, righteously. i would defend her honor, her foreignness.
andrew stared at me. ms. fredericks stared at me. carolina stared at me, with fire in her eyes. i was avenging her, she would love me forever, write me letters with exotic stamps i could cut out and paste in my photo album. the moment lasted forever, and then it happened.
carolina opened her mouth and spoke to me for the very first time.
"that's how you're supposed to say it," she told me calmly. "it's not stupid." andrew brown bent whistling over his notebook. ms. fredericks hid a smile behind her hand and tried hard to look like she hadn't overhead. carolina glared at me like i was the one who was being rude.
i blushed furiously through the bus ride home, burning with humiliation over my mistake. how could i explain to her that i was protecting her? that i wanted her to ride home on the bus with me, and we could play computer games together and check each other's homework. there were no words. she sat at a different table the next day.
carolina didn't come back after christmas break, and i never saw her again. that year, i used a swear word for the first time and started asking my mom for brand name clothes and expensive shampoos, but i never forgot about carolina and how badly i wanted to be her best friend forever. and how much it hurt that my intentions were misconstrued.
sometimes i can't help but wonder if that rainy fall day in the music room isn't the reason i am becoming an anthropologist.
Labels: old chestnuts, pretentiously introspective: a series
posted by lindsay at 22:08 :: 2 comments
26 August 2006 : sighted; part 4 of 6
her abdomen proceeds her as she makes her way down the sidewalk, stepping carefully past cracks and shoots of green. from a distance, though you can tell she is a large woman, the bowl of her belly does not conform to ideas of obesity. instead, to the eye of an interested amateur (my eye, see), it looks as though perhaps she's suffering from malnutrion, from kwashiorkor. you've seen them, the children with the swollen bellies, a skinny little boy looking like nothing more than pregnant in the circle of sally struthers' arms.
this protrusion is given many explanations, among them swollen liver due to cirrhosis or simple fluid retention for any number of nasty reasons. i can't help but wonder if it's not about more than anatomy, more than disease.
the bones that form the pelvic girdle are thick and strong, fitted perfectly to form a cup with wings that extend up the back. they shifted and swayed this way and that as we stood upright. their mass is intended for strength, to stand up under the impossible responsibility of cradling human organs. the muscles that attach them, too, are thick and broad - muscles that will not easily tear. some mornings, surely, you've stopped to consider what keeps you upright with no thought to physiology, the miracle that is your body.
i don't question this anymore, because i know the bones and their perfection. i know what works with what, and why each movement is a choreographed ballet of sinew and socket. i could fall to my knees before such perfect machinery, fall to worship at the altar of human flesh. this is nothing about love, romantic love or sex, nothing about desire.
it is about abstractions and waking up every morning knowing this: i have two feet, and a heart that beats.
i would only be able to express my feeling for a perfectly created machine in a language normally reserved for words on god. how easy it is to take for granted existence and how easy to abuse what is given you, how the assurance of youth is to be immortal.
i have heard theorized that man's machines are a sort of proof of god, of a flawless designer whose time is best spent building blueprints - hiding them subtly - so that man could reproduce them in plastic, in machines. i see no such connection.
the click of a shutter. the blink of an eye. the perfect designs of our bodies reflected as it should be in the material world. the existence of a camera does not give me faith in anything but that maybe once existed someone else who felt as i do. humanness is a gift not bestowed benign among the bushes of a humble beginning, but a gift of discovery, something we gave ourselves in a triumphant emergence from the forest.
congratulations men. you see blue sky and the ripple of muscle.
the ilium, the ischium, the pubis. a holy trinity i can get behind.
and i wonder if this distension of abdomen isn't about giving up. maybe the muscles of her stomach could no longer handle the strain of being upright. maybe they let go the strain of holding themselves together. maybe getting out of bed will soon no longer be worth the trouble.
it is a day of perfections. the woman walks with a white stick, tapping tapping her way down washington street. she smiles, and i smile at the grandeur of my assumed knowledge. normally my first instinct would be sadness, that she would not see the distinction of vivid blue sky and vibrant green grass, black asphalt and white cloud, the greens and oranges of corroded buildings, all the beautiful things of this world we made.
but i among all people should know that something does not cease to be beautiful when you close your eyes, nor does it begin to be beautiful only because they're open. the wind blows softly down johnson avenue, and her belly proceeds her as she makes her way down the sidewalk, feeling on her face the light of perfect day.
Labels: old chestnuts, pretentiously introspective: a series
posted by lindsay at 15:36 :: 2 comments
23 August 2006 : the snap judgment; part 3 of 6
4am
heat is radiating from every square inch of skin. i wonder, if there were enough light to see by, that i might not be releasing steam. it's the heat of a healing wound; my entire body has become an injury against the night. i couldn't say about the cause. it could be the whiskey i'm sipping straight from the bottle. it could be that i haven't eaten in 36 hours, during which i've had four hours of sleep. it could be the conversation. it could be too many cigarettes.
it's only been a few days since i sat on this porch and said to shari, "i just need to meet someone to be excited about. i need to make a new friend." i have no illusions about the man sitting next to me; probably i'll never see him again. i have no intentions for the man sitting next to me; if i made a move, either outcome could probably ensure that he'd never be back. but i like that he is new and i like that he is here, and he listens like everything i say is worth hearing.
12am
things are winding down at the theater. it's my favorite time of night, when everyone has filtered out save the staff and the bands, the lights are up and the floors have been cleared of couches, of equipment, of the swaying crowd of 20 somethings.
it's an old theater; the floor declines from the soundbooth to the stage, with nothing but a few old snags of bolt to interrupt a streamlined process. our chairs, they all have wheels. those without backs are the best, they move more quickly and offer less resistance. it feels like tradition as we line up against the raised platform on which rests the soundboard, prepare to push off for an audience and race to the bottom. i know what is coming, but each time i scream and giggle in tandem, thinking i'll hit a hole and tumble forward or stop too late, stop with my face.
i reach the stage last, but am unscathed by my loss. it is a hot, humid night and the rush of stale air against my face is enough to make me smile. i am full of an incongruous delight, the same that faces me at the end of each night i spend here. sometimes it is the music itself, a reminder that there are still people who create beautiful things for beautiful things' sake. sometimes it is the people i've met, or simply the taste of good coffee. tonight it is all of those things, my body responding to a freedom it had been craving through the duration of five stressful days. my head and everything below it were rioting against each other, looting and throwing homemade bombs around in loopy anger. nothing in my being had paused to say thank you for days.
i return to the top of the theater by pushing my legs, sandals sliding against the smooth concrete but even uphill and without traction i make good time. behind me someone yells "watch out!" but i do not turn around quickly enough to avoid collision with the man standing behind me. he halts my progress by putting hands on either side of my chair. my physical surprise should, but does not, prevent me from thinking quickly. he bends his face to my ear to mock me playfully for losing the race, and i lean my head back against him - partly for the thrill of feeling my long hair catch against his stubbled cheeks and partly so he will be able to get a nice, long breath of me. i know how good i smell.
it's so brief it almost hasn't happened, but something has changed here. and this is all i'll allow myself, this brief moment of contact.
8pm
i sit behind the table that serves as concessions with a book open in front of me, waiting for music to start, waiting to stamp hands should someone venture through the door. it's still beautiful daylight outside, no sign of the swelter that will mark the evening to come and i sit warmed by the sunlight as i read. i've worked maybe six shows but my instincts are already sharp, and the slight change in shadow makes me look up from the words on the page. he walks in tentatively, looks around and heads to me, asks "do you work here?"
i tell him where he can park and put his equipment, trying not to stare and trying not to be rude. there's something about him - tshirt so thin it may as well not be there, five or six days unshaven, long hair curling around his face. i have him pegged immediately, which says more about me than i'd like to admit. oversexed rock god, is what i think. this guy's gonna be a complete douchebag. he's barely as tall as i am, a fact i won't notice until several hours later when i realize that facing him, his eyes are at...eye level. he's larger than life, and i am unfair. the preceding days have left me feeling unwanted and unworthy, and it's my insecurities - admittedly few - that judge this stranger more than anything else.
but no matter my intellectual understanding; i am on the prowl tonight, for what i'm not entirely sure. i am full of prideful frustration and unspent agression and looking to disabuse myself of all this negativity. the moment, my fight-or-flight response to being intimidated by something i can't have, passes quickly but the feeling remains. i forget about him, dismiss it all and return to my book, all 400 pages of which i will read sitting outside the front doors while four bands play inside to my distracted ears.
one of these days, i'll learn to be grateful for these things that come along just when i need them, rather than being angry that each moment is fleeting. one of these days i'll stop imposing. in my adolescent anger, i moved too quickly and upon being proven wrong i was completely disarmed. situation normal: i'm an asshole.
Labels: pretentiously introspective: a series, Two steps forward
posted by lindsay at 23:57 :: 1 comments
21 August 2006 : the imagined hazard of watching; part 2 of 6
she was not a young woman, but she carried the baby on her hip as though it belonged to her. she carried the baby on her hip as though it had once lived and fed among the soft pink tissues of her body. i studied it as well as i could from this distance, wrapped in a blue cloth whose intensity fought for dominance with the sky, and wondered if she lived well inside of it, or if it were a losing battle against time. the details were fuzzy at this distance, but age - hers and the baby's - she carried well.
i smiled at her furtive, quizzical glances from where i sat in a soft scrabble of sand, holding my book and sipping precious bottled water too warm for home but delicious in the necessity created by the incessant heat of being here. my feet would dangle of the edge of the cliff, too far from the ocean to feel its spray, for several hours but she would never respond to my advances.
it could have been my skin, so white in the light of day except where it was burnt pink from the same. or it could have been my clothes, shabby and secondhand though they were, bursting with songs about the world i came from which we both knew was about as far from hers as intangible distance allows. my tshirt with its holes and my jeans with their frayed seams were still different, nicer somehow, than anything she could have laid hands on. i doubted she would want to, envying the way the wind ruffled up underneath her skirts and must even as i watched be laying soft hands against the smooth skin of her thighs.
maybe it was the men nearby.
her men, they had to be. men rough and drunken and possibly disapproving of any contact with me. i watched disappointed but never found the courage to stand and bridge the gap between where i sat with one foot looped in my bag strap for safety and the child beat awkward searching hands against the sand. the men - long grass, they would be called - were behind us several hundred yards in the shade of a picnic shelter but their presence, like i'd come to realize about most strange men, was electrifying in its pervasion.
i sat in my disappointment for what felt like hours, craving the feeling of that little girl's eyes on me, the smooth skin as yet unscarred by whatever hard work her life would be. plane rides and gambling, relinquished paychecks, liquor, petrol, the racism she would take for granted by grace of birth. i wanted that baby, wanted to taste her as pure and undiluted, another young possiblity. she could be one who broke the endless cycle of heartbreak, of thievery, of disuse. she could sweep into the streets the dust of empty, disheveled lives.
it was my own heart that was breaking, that day i sat reading on the cliff. where the trees failed to shade me, the sun beat against my back and my legs. i was acutely aware of these things: the crease between thigh and buttock, the bend of a knee, a downed upper lip, the bridge of my nose. cool points to take pleasure in against the heat of my body.
i watched hungrily the woman and the baby without ever swallowing what it was that held me back, two decades of my mother's voice in my ear, telling me never to talk to strangers, her fear when i told her i would span continents alone. the woman and her baby were safe enough, she would suppose, but what about the men?
what about them? did i fear their distinct foreignness, or that they were clearly intoxicated on an early sunday afternoon? why could i not leave my book behind and lay a hand on that little girl's brow? i would never know, because i would never try. the woman continued to glance back at me, but i returned to my book and hoped for the best of possible futures for all of them. my work was to study, not interfere. the trials of an anthropologist in training. somewhere compassion ends and observation begins. my guess is that i could find some etymological link between emperical and imperial, and it would allow for night after sleepless night.
behind us a man walked barefoot in a purple tshirt that hurt my eyes in the contrast to his skin, burnished to the bare shine of a roasted coffee bean. he wandered through the park a little dumbfounded, cupped hands held to his mouth as he shouted the inexplicable, "sean connery!" over and over again. his accent was so thick, so broad that i felt it slide down the back of my throat and thought i would never be able to stretch open my white-girl jaws to accomodate it. i would be forever meek.
i felt nothing but self loathing as i wrapped my foot more tightly in the strap of my bag and turned back to an afternoon of dispassionate reading, black words on a white page describing the plight of the people whose true stories walked all around me.
Labels: Australia, old chestnuts, pretentiously introspective: a series
posted by lindsay at 22:58 :: 0 comments
16 August 2006 : jeans and t-shirt girl: part 1 of 6
I haven't always been a jeans and t-shirt girl.
There was definitely a long period of time somewhere in there (think, birth - 10 yrs) where I wore pretty much nothing but pink, and most of my outfits matched completely. My favorite was this: pale pink oxford with slightly darker pink sweater-vest and even darker pink corduroy pants. This was still the early eighties, so believe me when I tell you that there was some serious flaring at the bottom of those cords.
Dad and Grandpa tried to fix it, in vain - dressed me in their t-shirts mostly, so I would toddle around on the sidewalk outside the house in a navy blue number that read "LOCAL 151" in white block letters larger than my entire body.
In the third grade I gave up on pink a little. At this point I was reading at college level and sneaking Sweet Valley University home from the public library in my backpack (book #2, Love, Lies, and Jessica Wakefield featured on it's cover Jessica Wakefield and a dashing young man with floppy nineties hair wearing only bathrobes and smiling at each other in the bathroom mirror - my mother considered this FAR too risque for her youngest child and only daughter). My favorite outfit that year was a pair of capri length spandex bicycle pants, black with a neon pink stripe on either side and a black t-shirt covered in glitter and splatter paint hearts: pink, blue, green.
I was in. I was watching what the other girls wore, sneaking a 12-color eyeshadow palette into the bathroom at school in the morning, scrunching my socks down over the tops of my sneakers. I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to wear silk shirts and pinch roll my jeans (these options were denied me until the fifth grade, when mom relented and bought me both).
Enter 1997. My freshman year of high school saw me entering a particularly vicious world. Tipton High School, with it's overwhelming population of 500 students in four classes, would never be kind to me. And I was fourteen, that worst of roughshot adolescent ages for a girl. My father had died four months before, and my two older brothers had left imprinted on every wall and locker a legacy of cool that couldn't possibly be upheld by the shy third child, sulking in a corner and scribbling angry poems in a red notebook. You should understand about Central Indiana that we follow the coastal trends at a leisurely pace (surely influenced by confusion over daylight savings time and a need to ensure the corn was in fact knee high by july 4th), and so things like Courtney Love and ball-chains had only just entered my worldview.
I learned to apply black eyeliner and wore to school every day a pair of drab green cloth pants whose bottoms measured 54 inches in circumference, but could be cinched by a drawstring for maximum skateboarding ease (I never skated, but oh did I love the boys who did - I still kind of do). I was listening to X103 - Indy's New Rock Alternative! - as a matter of course, because I couldn't claim street cred without knowing all the words to The Verve Pipe's "The Freshman" or Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug," a song I still love.
In geometry class, I was staring longingly at the back of Bryan Small's closely shorn blonde head, surreptitiously displaying my perfect test grades in case he wanted a tutor. He had offered me a warm hand on a cold playground one day in winter, two years my senior yet not embarrassed to play Red Rover at my side, and spent two years unfailingly not noticing my presence until the first day of my freshman year when he looked me up and down in my green skater pants and black eyeliner, gave me a curt nod of acknowledgement and walked on. He wore a Sebadoh shirt to school one momentous day and the next afternoon I drove a half hour to the nearest music shop (Sam Goody in the Kokomo Mall) and bought a Sebadoh album for myself. I listened to it religiously for six months before realizing that a) I was terrified of his girlfriend and wanted nothing of this crush to become public, cause bitch would KICK MY ASS and b) I was saving myself for Gavin Rossdale. I let the pants rot in the back of my closet and concentrated instead on wearing as much black as humanly possible.
I went through a few more phases between then and now - one most notably recorded by my friend Bobby who, senior year of high school dressed up like me and pulled it off with glorious accuracy (this was during the: wear as many colors as possible at once phase), complete with a name tag that read something along the lines of "I am Lindsay. I think Doug is in love with me." But Bryan Small, he was the beginning of the end. And each of those regrettable clothing phases was sincerely punctuated by the ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt. In fact, my closet is bulging because I haven't stopped wearing pretty much anything I bought past the age of sixteen. Because no matter how many days in a row I wore those green pants with my Airwalks, no matter how thick I laid on the eyeliner or how many test questions I let him copy, he wasn't going to be into me.
Thus I realized, eventually and only partially, that a woman is not what she wears. A hard idea to shake in this society that I live in, but at the very least, the kind of woman I hope I am is not what she wears. I wear my jeans (yes, dark and flared and tight) with pride, and my 3 for 7.99$ black A-frames without irony because they're comfortable and I feel sexy when I'm not parading, a point driven home the other night when I realized that I swing my hips in a particular pair of well fitted jeans but stumble uncomfortably in anything that could be considered "business casual" or dressier. It throws me off, makes me fumble for my words. I can't eat or drink through lipstick, and I'll suffocate my cat before squeezing into anything in the stocking family.
I bought that Sebadoh album again a couple of years ago and loved it - it's good stuff, music I'll put my word behind. And so far, my least complicated, most tenderly passionate and enduring relationship has been with black eyeliner. I think you have to admit that all the coolest girls have a gimmick.
posted by lindsay at 21:02 :: 4 comments