XVI - November ‘06
I tell M. about Ma when I went to pour glue into a bottle for an Ex-College class she’s teaching on theater, away from her students. Like Berkely, and elsewhere, I can only assume, Tufts seniors can teach courses to freshman on a Pass/Fail scale. They were nice kids, eager. While M’s co-teacher is talking to the class, I show M. a picture: I’m in a mascot-grade Owl costume, my arm around my Grandpa.
“Is this for me?” She asked.
“No. Just wanted to share.”
“Oh. Wait, is that an owl costume?”
That night they were making puppets, and I’d been there as a ‘Guest Lecturer,’ where I told them about an incident that had occurred after Chocolate Cake City — a comedy troupe I write and perform for and with — was done filming a series of sketches for the day, that had taken us all day. It was close to midnight, and we had dragged all our props and equipment into the restaurant, including a puppet. And for the rest of the night, the puppet hurled abuse on the wait staff, but instead of being kicked out, we were met with laughter and encouragement, one waitress even opining that if only she could take the puppet into the bathroom with her. The class was amazed at the story, laughed, but asked strange questions, like, “So did they think the puppet was Real?” “Did they believe in the Reality of the puppet?” And, “What made them act that way?”
XVII - December ‘06
I’m sitting with Cynthia in City Place, having lunch. A bagpipe — why is it bagpipes are the only instrument that make you feel like a bomb’s gone off? The IRA never took up music, right? — suddenly blared and filled up the entire area with its honky and creaky sound. People jump, and spend a few minutes looking around for the source.
For some reason, though, I wasn’t surprised, and continued to eat, non-plussed.
“I love you!” Cynthia said, delighted. “These things always happen when you’re around.”
XVIII - December ‘06
I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which was hard. I read About Alice, which was even harder. I read Donald Hall’s poems about the end of his wife’s life, and cried for half an hour afterward. I can’t get past the first page of Ginsburg’s Kaddish.
IXX - Another Part of December ‘06, Maybe February ‘07?
“You should really go see Pan’s Labyrinth,” M. said.
“Sure! When do you want to see it? It’ll be my treat!”
“Uh, Evan, we’re not really dating anymore …”
“Okay! When do you want to see it? It’ll be my treat!”
*
I see the film by myself. I cringe at the scene with the bleeding book, and walk out of the theater crying, not entirely knowing why.
*
I’m drinking vodka from a Poland Springs bottle — why don’t other bottle companies get in on the act, already? Just start putting sarcasti-quotes around whichever drink the booze-hungry ought-to-take-a-class-to-be-iconiclasts should be drinking! — in the middle of a workshop class, my narrative self, here, aghast at what a poor decision that was, my self in-scene, in-story jittery with frustration: a class taught by a perpetual mumbler who wouldn’t even engage your story if you’d offered him a wedding ring, a student who wielded her backstory as some sort of tragic/prideful cudgel in the judgements she made (her Mother had died five years earlier, and nothing was right after that), who’d wonder aloud why no one was talking about Aquinas without ever talking about Aquinas (and don’t get her started on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets), and M.’s ex-boyfriend coming back from Iraq ‘for good’ and feeling like a non-existent person with no confidence in my writing and stuck in a miasmic cloud that felt like it would force me to apologize to everyone else for being intelligent at any moment now and with no place to put myself to be, somewhere around perpetually solid points of reference …
The effects of the alcohol? Making a snarky joke to the teach’ about the alternative ending to 8 1/2, telling the prideful girl that she hadn’t even read past the first page of Philosophical Investigations, had she? And here’s what Tractatus was about, just because. And besides, if she wants to talk about rhythm, she should read Kerouac’s interview in The Paris Review, and here’s the page number, and I wonder what would happen if Putnam and Rawls got into a fight, though they wouldn’t, of course, would they? I’m sure there’d be some wonderful pre-history-history, peaceful protest from a brain in a vat, maybe with a picket sign. That sort of thing.
And so after class I leave with S. to walk her home, to continue talking about the day, the week, like we’d gotten in the habit of doing. I can’t remember when I first met her, but chances are, it was through her writing, which I admired from the get-go, and a refreshing focus she brought to the day. While other people ho-hummed their way through a conversation, she’d be the one to pretend to get engaged in restauraunt after restaurant in the name of ‘performance art.’ She’d be the one to find someone dressed in a leopard-print towel in public, raise her eyes, turn back to me and say in a voice loud enough to perk the Is-she-talking-about-me? radar, “I take back everything negative I’ve ever said about myself.”
On the way up a hill to her house, I say, hey, I want to talk about something, but — knowing that someone had used a similar situation before against her — I want to let you know that I’m not planning to use this information in a manipulative way, nor is it an appeal for pity, nor a marker for something to be used as the launching for something else further down the road, and I’m well aware that these things and situations often have downward spiraling logic, but all I want to do is to just convey information free of attachments or associations, and I start to tell her about my Mother, because I’d only told M. and the head of the troupe before, but she interrupted me and said that she already knew.
What? I said.
Don’t tell him I told, but Michael already told me.
And I realized that there was sometimes a sort of net in the world, but just a quiet one.
I’ll be, I said.
Yeah. My Mom’s friend had cancer, she said, so I know how you feel.
I’ll be, I said.
And she talked some more about something else, but my attention started to waver. When we reach her street corner, I said, look, can I come up for ten minutes? Just to shoot the shit? I’ve told so few people. I really want to talk. Ten minutes and I’ll be gone. Please. She had to get up early the next day. Please, I said. I’ve told so few people. She left. Get home safe, she said. I dropped my phone in the snow, and spent the next ten minutes looking for it on my hands and knees.
*
Later, seeing the film with my parents, I get a text from S., who apologized if she came off as insensitive during the walk, saying, “If you ever need to talk …” And I realized one reason why the film got me so bad the first time, and I avert my eyes and tighten up when the book begins to turn red.
XX - January 9thish, ‘07
Sometime between December and January, I spend my mornings at the Tisch Library at Tufts, buried amongst books. I started reading Orhan Pamuk then, having read and loved his Nobel Lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase.” In the first few days, I plow through The New Life and The White Castle and take a peak at a giant, two-part anthology I’d been meaning to read, Novel. Pasternak’s poetry, Mayakovsky’s poetry, all of Joe Frank’s biography on Dostoyevsky, Vollmann’s books, and others factor in, too.
*
I see her the day before my birthday, and I’m in a not-so-hot mood. Just wait and see, I say. I’ll email the guys from the Improv Asylum classes, some friends, give people a call. No one’ll be around, I laugh.
M. gives me a look.
I’m being sarcastic, I say. Otherwise I’ll come up to you with a pouty face and one of those conical caps on my head and somehow every party streamer/whistle thing I’ll blow’ll somehow sound bizarrely mournful and sad.
XXI - Jan 10, ‘07
You know, I say, laughing, minus the hat and the whistle and face, I’m not usually this prophetic. She doesn’t have much free time that day, she says, but makes an exception for me, “of course.” We get some coffee.
You read and write more than anyone else I know, she says, and hands me a small gift with a card attached to it, which reads: “Happy Birthday!!! A little something now, and a little something later.”
“What’s the later?”
“You’ll see.”
I spend the rest of the day with my Mom and Dad at the hospital. They ask me about my post-college plans. We listen to John Lennon and eat the cake the nurses had snuck upstairs.
XXII - November - December ‘06 - Bad to Worse (Kyrie Eleison)
My Mom’s Mom had lung cancer at the time, and died while my own Mom was still in the hospital. Dad hadn’t seen her since Thursday or Friday, and I got there on a Monday. What a strange feeling, to hug and comfort your Mother.
At the funeral home, the Church, and the graveyard, I say, I’ll call you and leave the phone on, so you can listen, okay?
Okay, she says.
The funeral home’s filled with so many people I can barely move. My Grandmother was fascinating and wonderful: wouldn’t stop talking, always offering you food, a lightning quick, thoroughly bizarre sensibility, i.e, asking a waitress what size her shirt was, then before waiting for an answer, lifting the shirt from the bottom up to try and see for herself. And other things. When we were going through my Grandparents’ house, we’d find stacks of boxes, tins, and envelops, bearing all sorts of names, filled with photographs, packets, clothes, money, and trinkets, all notes that my Grandmother had left to herself, as if to say: remember to give this to this person. I call my Mom, and after I head outside to check in, she heard the remarks wonderfully.
When we entered the funeral home, before the crowd arrived, my cousin reports that my Grandfather — the first man in his town to graduate high school, a POW, an astonishingly apt raconteur, a man with two Masters — walked over to the casket and said, “They left you here overnight?”
My Dad stood in the line with the family next to the casket. When relatives asked where my Mother was, he’d explain. Which led to a few conversations. One of which included a fat, drunkard of an Aunt, a woman who had a canary taken away from her at a New Year’s party because they thought she was going to crush it, who came over to me and said, Evan, dahling! How come you didn’t tell me about your mother? I don’t know, I said. Well, you could have just picked up the phone and said, Hey, Auntie Georgia, guess what? Yeah, I replied. Because this is exactly the type of thing you hear through the Grapevine.
Who the hell are these people? I heard another cousin asked. I’ve never seen half of these people in my damn life. Why are they here? An Uncle asks about my comedy and offers me the chance to drive his car. A real beauty, Evan! No thanks, I say.
At the chapel, someone who suffered a stroke is in the pews, and inadvertently gurgles and coughs through the entire service. I hold the phone nervously, casting frequent glances back, hoping the sound doesn’t obstruct my Mother’s hearing. Kyrie eleison, the priests sing.
The priest who does the service is a part of the family, and frequently cries and stops to collect himself throughout the service.
On the way out, planning to check in with my Mother, I look at the phone. That’s funny, I say. Did she hang up? Did I lose the call? I walk around the church, towards an empty parking lot away from the filled one up at the top of the hill. Hi, sweetie! Mom says. Has it started? And I start to cry. My legs give way.
XXIII - Back Home - Chirstmas And Late January
At home, my Mom and I play the piano and guitar together, the first time we’ve ever done a duet. She’s on piano. I’m on guitar. We play “Hey Jude” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I tell her about a line from Octopus’ Garden, something I first mentioned to M. while aping the songs on the radio, how “We would sing and dance around / because we know we can’t be found” sounds like an artist’s summa. She says that’s a great idea.
*
One of the few times I’ve seen my Dad betray any sentimental emotion in recent memory — a brief choking of the voice: when he took a picture of my Mother and I, posed and triumphant, at home, on Christmas Eve.
XXIV - December ‘06 - Jumping Back A Little Bit
M. and I are browsin’ up a bookstore. I’m shopping for my Mom’s birthday.
“So, what’re you going to get her?” She asks.
“A Ferlinghetti book. I found two, though. One’s poems, and the other’s a novelish sort of thing. Do you want the novel?”
“Maybe.” I hand it to her, and she starts flipping through it.
“Well, let me get it for you.”
“No, no!”
“Please?”
“No, look. I’ll buy it for you —”
“And if you scratch that and reverse it —”
“Wait, wait. How about this: I’ll buy it, then lend it to you, and then you can lend it back, okay?”
“Fine, fine.”
We’re passing the volumes on the shelves, running our hands over the spines — some plastic, others antiquated, grainy.
“Why’re there so many books to read? I don’t know which ones to pick!”
“Maybe we’ll open a Press someday. Pick any book we want.”
I kiss her forehead. (I couldn’t help it.)
XXV - January ‘07
Chocolate Cake City auditions new members, and when it comes time to introduce ourselves to the new members in the room, I’m first, and I say, “My name’s Evan, and you’ll quickly realize that I’m not that important.” It gets a laugh, and then we go out for ice cream.
On the way home, I pass some members of the trope.
“Hello, gentlelads and ladies! What’s up?”
“Hey,” Michael said. “We were just talking about how important you are, and how much we like you.”
XXVI - April ‘07
I tell joke after joke. I’m happy to be there, and find all the people I’m meeting fascinating, wonderful! They seem quiet and reticent under my social belligerence, and I hope they know I mean well. It’s M’s birthday, and I’m drinking too much gin and tonic, vodka, and smoking too much weed for my own good, not quite having as good a handle on my limits as I would’ve liked to have had.
At the restaurant, my head’s bobbling, and I start to feel my mind tunneling out again, and just then, M’s ex from Iraq, a genuinely nice and interesting guy who’d brought wasabi peas to share with everyone rubs my back. “You okay there, buddy? Still with us?”
*
On the way up the hill back to Tufts, M. and I end up at the back of the line of kids, and I apologize for the times when I was sad, saying things are going to be happy now, so happy.
*
Back at the dorm, she says, hey, do you think you could walk L. home?
I’d be happy to, I reply. L. is much more sober than I am.
Leaving, I say, je t’aime, je te manque, et vous et une reine. I love you, miss you, and you, Miss, are a queen.
I can’t understand what you’re saying, she said.
The next morning, I think, tact. You need to learn tact. And: I hope she wasn’t being polite.
XXVII - May ‘07
Mother’s Day comes, and I make a card — I’ve made all my cards since I was 8 (Good boy!), and it all started when I bought two postcards, one of which had a bear inbetween two humans, all three with their hands up against the back of a jeep, and I wrote, “Two wild humans help a bear start his car.”
But the card: the one for today is a picture of Dad and I carrying a bed with a terrified occupant holding a breakfast tray in to my Mother. “We brought you breakfast in a bed,” the card says. “WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?” The occupant cries. This makes her laugh. On the back of the card, since you always expect to see Hallmark back there, it says, “Scribble scribble scribble scribble.” This makes her laugh, too.
*
At M’s graduation party, I noticed something that I mentioned to her as we lay in the abandonned soccer field: how she talked to her sister. Her sister was special breed of sarcastic, the kind of sarcastic whose subtext read: I’m scared, I’m emotionally fragile, and so on, despite how interesting her jokes were. And M. was talking to her, pressing on, and her subtext was: I care about you, here are things that I think might be interested to you, and I’d like to share.
M. and Mom finally met sometime around a rainy midnight outside M’s house in Brighton, at the end of the graduation party. I’m leaning on a stop sign, wiped, buzzed on coffee and drunk on wine, while M hugs her and says, “It’s so nice to meet you” and is so glad to say it, and for a moment, the fragmented life coalesces.
*
M.’s friend gives her some photos of Jonathan Richman and Patti Smith her father took in concert some thirty-plus years ago, and M. is so happy, and keeps saying that it’s too much! Too much! And she holds her hand over her mouth, and looks at the photos again.
XXVIII - September ‘07
I’m catching up with Cynthia over a quick and early dinner. She talks about a book she checked out of the library analyzing Jeff Buckley’s Grace; that Stranger Than Fiction was a good movie; how she dislikes the fact that the publishing industry only seems to work seasonally, and how the slow workload during the off-season makes her worry for her job. Then she looks up at me.
“So, what’s new with you? Any new women on the horizon?”
“Well, no. Unless things are going poorly with your —”
“Nope! I’m just waiting for him to buy me a ring.”
“I — wait, uh — I’m sorry? Uh, eh — how old are you?”
“22. I always wanted to get married before I was 24, and it’ll take him about that long to sve up the money for a ring. So, yup! I’m done looking.” She claps her hands free of the matter.
“I, uh, see. Well, that’s good. That’s very good. An eventual congratulations to the two of you, then.” The food arrives.
“Thank you!”
XXIV - August ‘07
I visit M. to give her some peaches that grow in my backyard.
You know, it’s funny, I say. Did you know I’ve lost ten pounds in the past year? And the Doctor said, well, has anything happened in your life that could change your eating habits? Anything stressful?
Did you tell her yes, then say that you’ve been drinking too much coffee?
I laugh. Thank you for this, by the way, I say, pointing at the tea in my hand. It’s been a long day.
You’re welcome. There’s quiet.
Did I come at the wrong time, or —?
No, no. Everything’s fine.
XXV - September ‘07
It’s somewhere around 1 in the morning, and Michael’s cycling through a small pile of cheeses at the kitchen table.
“Try this,” he says, offering something with the rind still on it.
“What is it?”
“A goat cheese. It even hurt my aside fund a little bit,” meaning it cost over twenty dollars. And it tastes like it: holding the cheese in, it runs the gamut of five to six different flavors, textures, mostly creamy, then returns to its initial flavor at the end, and ends with a tangy punch, though ‘tangy’ doesn’t quite do the cheese its proper connotive justice. A rooted sourness, if you will. Something you’d expect from a lemon as opposed to whatever covers candy.
“Isn’t that amazing?” He exclaims. I agree.
XXVI - A Variety of Times
Sometimes I’d keep my Mom company at the Dana Farber Clinic, where she goes — with less and less frequency now, thank goodness — to have her white blood cell levels checked, along with a whole other variety of statistics. But it gives us a chance to bring along and talk about the books we’re reading, these visits, (me: Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude was one I’d spent a lot of time with and still couldn’t get through; her: Mailer’s The Deer Park or Hughes’ “Ways of Seeing”) or to go see a film (Paris Je T’aime!)
XXVII - XXIX - An Excerpt From An E-Mail Exchange with M.:
I just want to be as good to people close to me in my life as I possibly can, and to try and share as many possibilities with them too — you know, not just knowing someone from class because you know them from class, not just one thing, but knowing them from class, as well as the fact that they’ve done ballet, that their family’s raised an odd breed of dog for most of his/her life, that they like to shoot BB Guns around the house, and so on. To try and make things expansive, inclusive — you know, like in the book I syntax-retarded about earlier, they have a refrain that goes “the further in you go, the bigger it gets.” And to try and be as good about that as possible all the way further in.
XXX - September ‘07
I’m at a party on a roof in Beacon Hill, playing the name game. “Do you know Gaby Dunn?” I ask.
“Sure. She was in a class of mine last semester.”
“Cool! She’s in Chocolate Cake City.”
“Oh! Neat.”
“How about Chaz Formachella? No? Jack Waz? No? Mary McCoolPants? No? Avagadro’s Constant? Anyone ever met Avagadro’s Constant? What about Bohr’s Atom? Anyone here met Bohr’s Atom?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Thank god. I thought I was the only one.”
I sighed, answering the kid who posed the question. “This is me communicating.”
*
Downstairs, I send a text to S. — “Beep,” it says, and continue to listen to some film guy’s braggadocio-ladden talk that’s rubbing my patience the wrong way. She writes back, “I’m downtown in Allston. What’s up?” And I think to myself: communication.
XXXI - August ‘07
We’re seated in a Greek restaurant in Lenox, eating dinner before we go over to see A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at Shakespeare & Company, and my cousin, 18, says that she’s made a discovery.
“Hey, I discovered something important a few weeks ago.”
“Oh?”
“When you’re in a dream, you can’t die.”
“Sure,” I amicably replied. “And you can fly, speak languages you don’t know — all sorts of fun things.”
“No, no. But you … can’t die.”
“What, you mean, like, medically?”
“Yeah.”
” … Did you have someone try to kill you, or — ?”
“No. My sister was in my dream, and she told me.”
“… What?”
“She told me I can’t die in my dream, so wouldn’t it be cool if you could, like, dream all the time, then?”
“Yeah, but, look: the only way someone can die in their sleep is through an aneurysm, a ruptured blood vessel, if they were infirm and sickly already, or through something extraneous, like drugs, a fire, or what have you. Dreams have no physiological affect on the world, y’know, Lincoln’s dreams be damned. If you want to talk about Jung or Freud, fine, talk about Jung. Aside from artistry and psychology, not to mention the fact that sleep is healthy, you’re only going to get so much out of a dream.”
“You can’t die?”
“No!”
“Speaking of which,” she continued. “I want to eat as many different kinds of fish possible before I die.” And I felt like the subtext was, given the way and tone in which she phrased it, don’t you?
My parents laughed at the question. I felt like sinking into the floor.
“That’s why I want to go to Japan,” she added.
“Why not go to the Cape? Better yet, go to the Supermarket and call it Japan. Besides, aren’t there websites where you can order fish online?”
“Yeah, but, I want to go to Japan.”
“Then buy a plane ticket.”
“But they have different fish in Japan.”
“Then go to the website.”
Play aside, the night didn’t get better.
XXXII - Friday, October 12th:
We saw Orhan Pamuk give a reading at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, me and my folks. I told him I was looking forward to The Museum of Innocence. “Ah, yes!” He replied. “It’s going to be very …” And he paused for a moment, looked away, searching for just the right word — “good.” And we laughed. I told this to my parents, and they laughed, too. My Mother leaned into my Father outside, and he kissed her on the head and rubbed her back to keep her warm.
XXXIII - September ‘07:
I’m hugging S. “You’re a good friend,” I say. “Get home safe,” she replies, and means it.
XXXIV - May ‘07 - Five Months Later, That “Little Something Later,” After A Chocolate Cake City Show:
“Here you go.” She hands me something in a white jewlery box. I open it up, and it’s a wallet. A hand-made wallet. She made me a wallet. Who makes someone a wallet? On the front, it says, “It’s night time in the big city …” There’s a yellow moon hanging over some blue buildings. On the inside, with enough space to put Driver’s Licenses and Library cards, it reads: “The pizza parlor’s locking up. A drunken security guard drops his flashlight.” I’m at a loss for words. I show it to other people in the troupe, only saying, “Look! Look what she made me!” That an object could be so thoroughly transformed.
XXXV - Back to the Beginning:
One thing about the dance I forgot to mention: the emotion that accompanied it. The unflinching honesty. What do you do when you’ve cancer and you’re six floors above street level? You dance! There was presence, waves of presence, a giant “lifeline,” people radiating themselves like electricity off a telephone wire — it was the emotional launchings of an articulation of the layers of presence of someone in a life, of the action and attention that could be paid, be it conversational, memory-bound, or something that takes shape in writing. It was a place where saying, “Look there, look there” seemed rational, obvious. It was a blast of grace in a concourse of dead buildings. A moment of growth, change. A surprise. Someone tipping their hand, a genderless voice, saying, This might get better.
