There is no Mrs. Hurston. I live in a house with three other people, and I have to convey the opposite effect. This is done by a series of patterns — getting up at 5:00, leaving the house with a bag of costumes, walking to where I parked the car the night before, clearing away the branches and rubble, checking to see if anyone or anything is hiding inside (raccoons necking, squirrels chewing through my cassettes), getting in, enduring that stuttering roar — and the heading back, foot off the accelerator as often as possible, pulling in the parking lot near our house we share with a nearby apartment building across the street, getting out of the car, trying not to slam the door, making sure my wig is still on, still balanced, clutching at the pearls once or twice for good measure, crossing the street, letting myself in through in through the back door, checking to see if anyone’s in the kitchen — what would otherwise be a small, black-and-white tile, Grandmother-in-Atlantic City affair if it weren’t for the hanging binds of oregano atop the kitchen window next to the shrunken voodoo heads and how Marissa and Tom would on some nights pretend to blindly fumble for either one or the other as the soup or dish was being prepared on the oven which Tom was in the middle of one night after I had come back from a music show in Davo and Marissa spotted the ring that was on my finger and slammed me into the refrigerator, saying, “Who is she? Who is she?” and I managed to squeak out a few details, her eyes narrowed, and she said —
“Well — I’m glad you two found each other and fell in love.”
There was no one left to fall in love with, I wanted to say.
I remember a few years ago that any approach towards a declaration of affection was misinterpreted as a freakish sign of instability; so many people were scared to approach anything resembling the real thing — and if the only way into someone’s heart was to be ludicrously boring or to become proficient in the mercenarial sexual politics of the moment, then a fake wife it was for me.
But I stick with these two. I stick with Tom and Marissa because of some sort of mutual elevation. I like that word, don’t you? I don’t know what it is, but when one of them enters the room, the water starts to rise.
The morning begins a second time with Marissa tugging at the belt loops to her jeans like she was jumping into a potato sack, already late, sometimes the music to a LP playing, including the bubbling bass at the beginning of some live cut of “All Blues”— out of the bathroom door with her “Pepsi Girl” hair and face bouncing up and down in ballerina arm curls, and I will look to the bathroom door again, half expecting a string of thunderous like-minded racers passing through the kitchen also in hot pursuit, she will grab the toast from the toaster with her teeth, remove the bread, give me a long kiss, and to the door — to the door — to the racing out the door.
I lean forward, peak into Marissa’s room, and there on the mattress her girlfriend often turns — often just her head and blond shards of “Riot Grrl” hair in the frame in an otherwise white room — smiles and waves. I raise my cup of coffee in greetings or have my hand crawl up from behind the mug and wiggle its fingers or fold up a piece of paper and send it soaring into the room with the words written on the side, “Why did we think turning the Titanic into a paper airplane was a good ideaauuughhh —” and if Tom hasn’t slept in his room that night, I head outside to find him to start work.
I haven’t left, though. Still the coffee and still the waking. Our kitchen counter-top is a veritable Monticello (and in an alternate universe, Jefferson would have lived in a Monti-cello and bowed strings the size of tree trunks every evening) in the amount and variety of knick-knacks that line the walls.
Three catch my attention: the soap boxes and the cigarette cartons stacked haphazardly together against a bread box that has a crunched and cringing face trying — one would assume — to contain the contents that rest inside, the oranges, and a note left underneath. Four things that catch my attention. Four.
I get up and go over to the note, which reads —
Dear Mr. Hurston,
Here are some oranges for you to break into with your thumbs or to set spinning on the counter-top. Hope you have a good day.
Love,
Mrs. Hurston.
The Charlotte morning still has a sky filled with stars — even during the summer. These are stars that mill around. They are not in any hurry to get home. The ties are un-done and the drinks are being picked up by a free thumb or pinkie. One at a time. A blade of grass sticks its hands into its back pockets to whistle. They all know where they’re going.
I have to admit: I’m somewhat stunned. Neither Tom nor Marissa have that conspiratorial bent in them, nor do their partners, and I know that I’m not dealing with some young, more comely Ms. Froy as a neurosurgeon with a halting delivery and uncontrollable twitch and blink might explain during some regrettable evening at Park Terrace, the hotel-styled-sign buzzing over the modernist white thatch that welcomed the audience in a moment ago. I mean, I just don’t understand: there is no Mrs. Hurston.
If Tom can’t get uptown to grab his clothes before we start work, I have to bring them to him. Milestone, the Ministry Center, and Rajbhog inevitably pass by.
Walking down Central past the glowing, low-slung Penguin probably still filled with students and heading past the library with the “Protected Building Habitat” filling the sky in the background — the first set of buildings being grown in North Carolina — I try to answer all the questions a Grown Building poses just to see how easy it is to outrace the experts (if at all): if spider webs make great bullet proof vests, how are they for bricks for small structures? Is there a way to take the QED properties at work in photosynthesis and apply that to a building’s sense of self and how it operates? If buildings can grow to repair themselves, can we try and grow a plant to squirt out water at regular intervals for the windows?
The small crowd lining up for the light rail. There is a square jaw suit and tie who is inches away from slipping into the realm of “Gumby Villain.” He keeps checking his blackberry — which glows like one of those signs lit up alongside the highway with three spotlights, three spotlights that were expecting a three ring circus and had to make do with a giant business card instead — and keeps quietly complaining to the woman next to him, saying, “What is it with these news guys? Were you watching Channel 9 last night? They say they’re local news, right? And the lead story that night? About a swan being hit with an arrow — in Alaska” and while his harangue continued, I looked at the ear-muffs seated, thoroughly absorbed in Anna Karenina — back and forth between the man complaining about the news and the man reading the novel and decided to stop by one of the two Brazilian coffee houses that are open that early in the morning, frequently hit with the exhortation, “If I could just show you São Paulo — oh, que saudade!”
The proprietor’s name is Lusenrique. He is one of the few people I’ve met who seems to find a joyous utility in his barrel-gutted chest, swinging it to and fro and sometimes pointing to items on the house menu with it — “You want” — cue the heave — “this?”
He is a food-addict who claims that he was a skinny young athlete for years until the body he currently wears jumped him in an alley and he was forced to find young children to carry the trailing wedding veil that is his neck fat. Thankfully, the latter is not a reality.
He treats these morning stops of mine like it’s part of the daily briefing. Sometimes I feel thankful for the assumed trust and respect that this implies. Sometimes I feel like a student trying to catch up. While I can read people to a certain extent, I hope that the gap he knows and I know I have to close — that is, when the gap exhibits itself — is my show of respect to him.
He grabs a copy of the New York Time, flips it down in front of me and looks me square in the eye and we begin — or begin to sidetrack and meander: we hop away from the stories to what he knows or claims to know, like “how Jaime Lerner was yelling at a man from the highway department, okay? And he said, You know what is going to make Curitiba a great city? and when the man from the highway department flanked by the representatives from the automotive company said, What? Lerner just smiled” or how he once convinced a BBC correspondent who owns a hotel in one of the favelas — Bob Nadkarni — to introduce and develop a co-op system so that locals have a chance for serious investment and aren’t pushed away by a rising tide of gentrification — or how he managed to convince Haas and Hahn in a meeting at Copenhagen to come to Vila Cruzeiro and challenge two smart-as-all-get-out kids to paint an entire favela and they grin with the ambition of a kite facing down a hurricane in a bull-ring knowing that they’re going to win, and “me, my own self, I can only contribute so much, but when I want to get something done, I’ll get it done. I once went down to the police station and dragged all the books they’d taken from the school back one by one, because I’ll be damned if they’re not going to read Bras Cubas or Mário and Oswald de Andrade, Bound for Glory or Operation: Churchill — and you may not believe my claims, but there are some people in this world who deserve more belief and wider ears, and besides, the wider your ears are — ” or how he initiated a tour for people who wanted to give tours to celebrities through favelas and not pay the residents a single dime and just led them in circles for hours upon agonizing hours —
— or saying that he will break out the crucial papers — but later, later — of how the first Brazilian to be taken to the European continent in 1505 was supposed to go in 1205, but — you know — até amanhã, finally reading through the New York Time, saying, “This is an odd headline — look at this: ‘Glenn Greenwald: Meticulously Joyful, Exuberant,’” and goes on to talk of green-covered fins that had first covered the federal building in Portland expanding to the rest of the buildings in the city, the god-damn, just-wait-for-the-corporate-video-to-capitalize anecdote of nineteen different kinds of workers reaching out the window to pick an apple from the branches of one, the amplification of the phenomenon of birds aggregating on the ivy-covered side of a New England building to work-stopping, ampitheric levels — I tune out for a blink of a second and look at the wall: covered head to foot in what are supposed to be concert posters but instead just say the word, “Csikszentmihalyi” over and over again — though vegetable fins — is he still talking? — are reaching such a fever of competition in neighboring Seattle that the tendons from some buildings are pulling other buildings down —
I stand up and thank him for the coffee and the morning, but that work is calling me away for today and that I’ll be back tomorrow and he says, “Time? What do you know about time?” and I say, “Perhaps I’m already there!” and he laughs, I catch one last glimpse of another poster on the wall, the orange peels rattling in my jacket pocket —
— look back to him, he giggles and gnaws on his arm, and I’m out to do the work for the day, the work which requires Tom: shooting b-roll.
B-roll is secondary or alternative footage. It is us capturing a few seconds of a flower for a director or narrator who later want to make an argument about a flower. Sometimes our minds wander while we do this. Sometimes — when we see our B-roll split up over days or weeks of coverage — we joke that the patience of ours actors was extraordinary — that they were willing to stand still for that long!
It is a job that is both simple and complex, concrete in what it captures — but provocative in its associations.
I finally get to the string of apartments where Tom’s girlfriend lives and start shouting. “Tom!” My voice is a croaking dog being side-swiped by a church bell out on the highway. “Tom!”
The window opens. Tom’s head.
”What?”
”Work?”
“Fine!”
He closes the window and I shout something about making sure to scrub behind the ears even though he can’t really hear me and ten minutes later, we are off to a protest at a nearby university.
Tom scans the crowd.
“I feel like we’re coming late to the game on this.”
I break out the camera.
“Too late now.”
And like a curtain rising —
“We are here to rally against the forces of uni-dimensionality and moral ambiguity, as one does not — and should not — necessitate the other. One uni-dimensional view meeting another doesn’t mean irreconcilable moral confusion, let alone slow, shuffling feet. The world aims at totality, not this lopsided dancing pair. I’ll say it again — the world aims at totality.”
