Happiness
As I was waiting for an F train, I asked a man how tall he was. He said he was 6 foot 10. I told him he was beautiful, and he smiled in a way I could see he loved life. I went to a part of Brooklyn where the sky hangs big and pillowy over dark parks and streets. It was cool and drizzly. I had an umbrella but no sweater, and I moved quickly to build up heat. I went to a bar to meet a friend. I said, “Anything that feels good is good.” I knew it wasn’t true as soon as I said it, but what are you going to do. Also, it was a little true.
My friend said, “Do you think that anything that feels bad is bad?” I said, “Do you mean like grief?” He said, “Maybe.” I said, “No, I don’t think things that feel bad are always bad.” I didn’t want to think about examples because I didn’t want to feel bad, and I was aware, in a way that is always sudden, you could change your brain state by deciding to think a certain way.
He finished his beer, tipping back his head. I was attracted to the remoteness that had formed around my friend. People liked doing favors for him because he didn’t ask for anything. I once took care of his dog while he went skiing. I didn’t know what I was to him. I didn’t think I was anything more than one of the people he could call. That seemed like something, and I wondered if all my life I had made more of things than they actually were. I placed my hand on the caramel fur between the dog’s eyes, then moved over his head and between his ears, across his long, muscular neck and tapered waist. The dog had the waistline of a long-distance swimmer.
I read a poem by Donald Hall posted by a friend on Facebook. The poem is called “Affirmation,” and it’s about old age and the discontents you half smile through because what else, and half wince through because what else. The things the poet says go wrong for him concern women.
. . . But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
. . . If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
When I read these lines, I was happy for the women who got away. You go, girl, I was thinking, which made me even happier because the poet wanted me to care about him, poor old guy, and didn’t know how he made that impossible.
I watched a documentary about David Bowie’s final years, and there he was, conveying at every single fucking stage of his life the charm of being a thin, handsome, English shard of light with reserve. The thing you have to admire about Bowie is the way he combined in new ways changing his clothes, singing with steel-toned strain, getting new teeth, and looking happy with great hair in front of massive crowds. People heard themselves thinking differently about bodies. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had the quiet confidence built up over centuries. His thinness, shyness, and passion to be looked at swirl around you in such a charming and captivating combination, it’s easy to forget the mindset in a poem by Donald Hall and the exquisite safety felt by John Mitchell, the absolute certainty he felt of getting a laugh, when he said, on his way to jail, that he preferred his prison sentence to staying married to Martha.
When I look back at my life—and on Friday I will be 78—I do not see myself as an instrumental figure in a poem by Donald Hall or as a woman disliked for the wrong reasons, as to some extent Martha Mitchell was. You have to admire Martha for her unswerving implication of Nixon in Watergate and because of the way she was a fist of sand in the eyes of men who needed to be stopped. I see myself as disliked for the right reasons, the way I think it must have been hard for Jesus to keep friends, what with all the advice he was handing out. “To grow old is to lose everything” is the first line of “Affirmation.” Not if you can still make strangers happy in the subway.
The other day, Richard and I were on our way to the car when we passed a long line of people waiting for the fanciest of all fancy bread people, who had popped up again for a drive-by offensive in Hudson. The line traveled from the sidewalk down through a park into the bowels of whatever that was too far away to see, and everyone was there with their dogs. I spotted a writer I know and her little dog. I said, “Is this just for today?” She said, “Today and tomorrow.” I said, “I would wait with you, but we're walking. Also, you know, all this, really, for fancy bread.” She said, “I totally disapprove of standing here, but what are you gonna do. It's like a fuckboy who knows no matter what he does you will always drop everything when he shows up.”
I remembered a time before I understood what people meant by taste, before I could discriminate between thing type A and thing type B. I liked every movie I saw and every kind of ice cream I ate. I didn’t understand how people could rank things. I’m ten, maybe, when that state of being slides into something else. I look back at that time, if it’s real, with longing or a form of fake longing—I honestly can’t tell the difference—enjoying an image of myself as innocent in this way, allowing experience, people, and knowledge to flow into me with excitement that can’t be dimmed.
Last week, driving from Hudson to New York City, we listened to a live performance of “Gimme Shelter.” The opening guitar riffs are the first sip of gin—that easy slip to a place you want to be. This morning, the cows were in the pasture we can see from our bedroom windows. The cows are beautiful with broad stripes across their bellies. In the video of the live performance, Keith stands off to the side with his guitar, which is an extension of his mind, or he laughs with Ronnie Wood, whose hair rises up like the roof of a pagoda. They aren't looking at Mick, who is jutting around the stage, dancing a dance of triumph over disappointment. You don't become cynical with age, you become freer in a way that’s romantic.
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Midnight Run
Midnight Run (1988), starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, is a love story in the form of a crime comedy. Maybe all love stories are crime comedies. De Niro plays Jack, a former cop working as a bounty hunter, and Grodin plays John, a mob accountant on the run for stealing fifteen million dollars he’s donated to charity. Jack nabs John in New York and must return him to Los Angeles to claim his reward.
After John pretends he’s terrified of flying, the movie becomes the Odyssey without the pressure of returning to Penelope. The men need only each other, and in this odd-couple marriage, the movie delivers a love letter to the wrong assumptions we make about strangers. The assumptions are always wrong. In the absence of knowledge, we have only ourselves to fill in the blank, and we are never them. The only way to discover what another person is is to allow them to unfold in time through a series of tests.
The movie runs 2 hours and isn’t long enough. While Jack and John are moving from point A to point B, they are chased by another bounty hunter, federal agents, mob hit men, and local police wherever they are. Sometimes fleets of police cars and squadrons of snipers show up at the same train station before the pair have jumped out of a moving freight car, only to roll into white water rapids.
It’s always interesting to look back at a movie you saw 36 years ago. What were your politics? What did you find funny? What did you think of the way De Niro used his tongue in anxious moments and darted his eyes when taking to people? Did you think he was good actor? What did you think that meant back then?
Other than people smoking all the time, the movie hasn’t lost its seductive power. The characters don’t need to learn anything or change. We know from the first moments that De Niro’s angry hunter will save Grodin’s fox in schmendrick’s clothing, rather than deliver him to his death. The suspense is in the way their intimacy grows. In intimacy, the men surprise themselves. That’s how you know it’s a love story.
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I loved reading this piece, Laurie. I'm 77 and I have no intention of letting a single minute slip by that I don't suck the life out of. When I was 12, I read a book by Ray Bradbury called DANDELION WINE. It's semi-autobiographical, and is about Ray himself the summer he was twelves and realized that he was alive...alive in the sense of being a unique oneness that needed to take in EVERYTHING. As we age, we have no way of knowing what will be taken away from us with each passing year, month, week. But we can damn well read, listen to music, write, have friends, kiss our spouses and our family, and spread as much love as possible.
Love your line, “You don’t become cynical with age, you become freer in a way that’s romantic.” Yeah, baby. XX