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Sixty Years Ago, November 22, 1963
I’m 17, in the Donnell Library on 53rd Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. I’m studying for my Graduate Record Exams. In June, I’ll graduate from Woodmere Academy. In the fall, I’ll go to college, leave the apartment of my parents, and never live with them again. I don’t know how much happiness and freedom this will usher for me and also a sense of exile that doesn’t fade in all the years since.
Suddenly, there’s a stirring at the long tables, crowded with people reading. Broken bits fall out of the whispering—“He’s been shot,” “Oh, Jackie,” “The president is hurt . . .” I don’t know how this happens. People can rise up together, as an emergent system, a network of individuals that move as one thing, without the instruction of a leader.
We pack our belongings and slowly move onto 53rd Street. On the corner of 5th Avenue is a large electronics store. We gather at the windows and watch the TVs, all tuned to the scenes from Dallas. We can’t really hear the sound, but the facts spread among us, and when it’s announced the president is dead, we drift off from the group, changed for life. Something in us, as a country, has died, and we start to go on living with that death inside us.
Each of us is floating in space, the way Frank Poole will float in place in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. We’ll float in space like Frank, suspended and abandoned by HAL, the murderous computer, programmed by humans who are themselves descended, in Stanley Kubrick’s telling, from murder-minded apes.
I already know something of the way the world works, but I haven’t told anyone about the sexual advances of André Glaz, the family shrink, at his country house when I was fourteen. I’ll tell Bruce, but I won’t meet Bruce until the party I go to on that coming New Year’s Eve. I already know the world is far more odd and dangerous than advertized, and the muder of JFK will remind me of this in a way I can taste as I write now.
I call my friend Gail Grynbaum from a pay phone. I have already fallen in love with her family of cultivated Polish Jews, who escaped Europe when, in 1939, they visited the New York World’s Fair. It’s a Friday, and Gail and I start walking toward each other. We meet in the 70s, and we go back to Gail’s apartment, on 96th Street and West End Avenue, and we stay there for the weekend, huddled around the TV.
Gail, me, Gail’s brother Stevie, and Stevie’s friend Sammy, with whom I’m also in love, see Jack Ruby swim up and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. How can this be happening? How can anything be happening? Believe me, the Watergate break-in will be a thrilling surprise, I mean the depths of stupid and deceit we’ll discover when the story breaks will be a thrilling surprise, but the world has already been tilted on his axis the day Kennedy is killed, and even though we will never exactly know why, we know without a doubt how the world works. The world works with one thigh bone, used as a murder weapon and thrown into the sky with glee, followed by another weapon, and another one.
Thanksgiving, 2004
I walk to Sutton Place along the East River. The water flows gently. Yellow leaves on the trees look lit from within. Among the caterers are two actors, who are friends of mine, also a chef and her assistant, who when he’s not cooking, sails as a merchant marine for the European Union.
When all the waiters have arrived, we’re directed to the service elevator by one of four doormen. The elevator car is piled with garbage bags and looks as if it hasn’t been swept in years. A pretty woman steps into the elevator with us and wishes us a happy Thanksgiving. She speaks with a Spanish accent and is carrying four shopping bags, two in each hand. We wish her a happy Thanksgiving and the same to the elevator operator, who speaks with a thick Irish brogue.
We’re supposed to have two hours to set up, but guests arrive early. I set the table while one of the actors goes to buy more ice and the chefs finish cooking the meal. Another of the waiters serves drinks. The guests are neither friendly nor unfriendly, rude nor gracious. We don’t look at each other except in glances. We’re two families of strangers, ushered into a common room.
The menu includes turkey, gravy, stuffing, two kinds of cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, haricots verts, baked lady apples, sweet potato compote with marshmallows, and miniature buttermilk and chive biscuits, baked in the shape of hearts. There are five kinds of passed hors d’oeuvres, including shrimp dumplings with spicy, plum dipping sauce. The desserts include individual tarts tatins and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, plus chocolate-dipped strawberries, petits fours, and cookies.
Each guest requests a different arrangement of food on their plate, and if the plate is not delivered as specified—say, three slices of white meat with gravy on the side and extra mashed potatoes but no stuffing—it has to be done again, even though platters of seconds are butlered as soon as the first dishes were set down. This kind of thing is not unusual in our experience, and it makes us feel part of a different world.
All in all the job is easy. Between courses, I wash and dry plates, silverware, and glasses. As we perform our tasks, we nibble bites of food rather than sitting down for a meal. Really, we spend the day picking up conversations with each other. One of the actors has been in Austin for several months, performing in a play he very much enjoyed. The exgirlfriend of another of the actors is still calling her all the time, she says with fake irritation. After serving dessert, we clean the place, so it looks like we’ve never been there. When there is nothing left to do, I feel adrift.
The next day I walk past the Planetarium on Columbus Avenue and notice neat piles of leaves and litter lined up in front of tall oak trees. A slight man in a blue jacket is sweeping the area, using a FedEx envelope as a dust pan. He has a friendly face and a wool hat pulled low on his forehead. It’s very cold. The sky is the same color as the pavement, the gray of a dead tooth. I stop to talk to the man, who is past middle age. He says he’s removing rock salt from around the trees before it kills them. He has been at it for four hours and only eight people have spoken to him so far. I think he’s lonely, and I wonder about the relationship between sweetness and loneliness. Do you spread sweetness to attract people or does sweetness bubble up out of you into the solitude? After we finish speaking, I feel happier.
Later I go to a yoga class taught by a woman who has recently spent two months in Croatia and is returning to a class of only five. She looks scared when she sees how few we are. During her absence, the charismatic teacher she’s replaced has resurfaced and is joking about, “kicking her to the curb.” People like his cruelty.
I haven’t taken many classes with the yoga teacher. Her practice is repetitious, but I enjoy watching her lobster her body into bends and twists. During class, I’m awkward and lazy. The charismatic teacher would have pressed me to do better.
After class, I remind the yoga teacher it’s Thanksgiving weekend and people are away. She says her life isn’t working out in New York, and she doesn’t know how to fix it. She’s working on a master’s degree in English literature and isn’t sure what to do next. The thing she likes most is talking to people about literature. Should she work in a book store? I can’t recall ever enjoying a conversation about literature in a bookstore, but I don’t want to dampen her plans. I say, “My life isn’t working out that well, either.” She says, “Really?” I say, “Yes.” It’s true and not true. I don’t want her to feel alone.
The Grifters
My tits are holding up better than The Grifters (1990), the first US film directed by Stephen Frears. We watched it again last night—as part of Criterion’s con artist series. The movie is a neon sign for cool. The cool of all times. What is cool? Cool is noir. Noir is a projection of light on sheets through Venetian blinds. Noir is hardbitten and yearning and striped.
Cool is women bleeding and making other people bleed. That’s it. Women who are murderous to men and murderous to other women. Women smudged and dead, or women left for dead, or women wandering off with ripped stockings soaked in someone else’s blood, or women “taking the fall” if Humphrey Bogart is anywhere around.
In noir, the female is deadly and the male is a hard-on so dazed by maybe getting laid he becomes beautiful and innocent in his own eyes. Who is this for? Cool is for boys and for girls appointed as “one of the boys.” Think about it. The Beats, the Warhol crowd, the Mailer thing so greasy it’s left behind a dirty slick as it’s gone down the drain. Drugs, sex, rock and roll, punk nihilism, the literary boys who think the world owes them, the self-delighted drone of boy ideas and boy images.
In The Grifters, John Cusack is Roy Dillon, a small time con artist and Anjelica Huston is Lily Dillon, a lifelong con artist who works a scheme at race tracks for a vicious bookie. She is also Roy’s mother—she had him at fourteen and told people he was her brother. The third con is Annette Bening as Myra Langtry, looking for a schlemiel to work a long con with and live high again as she did in the past. When the two women face off, guess what happens in the mind of Jim Thompson, who wrote the book in 1963 on which the script, written by Donald Westlake, is based? The women become friends and wear each other’s clothes! Not exactly, although there is a costume swap after one of the women winds up with her face blown off.
The movie received raves when it debuted. I remember liking it because, I think, I thought I was supposed to like it. Watching it last night, it was glaring the way the history of cool carries with it a deep enjoyment of dead women. Nonetheless, I was entertained by the way the movie is all plot. This happens, and then the next thing happens, and then this other thing happens, and people bleed. No one thinks about what they are doing. No one has an interior life. That is part of cool, and I have to say it is cool to watch a story that doesn’t care why people do things, and maybe doesn’t care because people don’t know why they do things and even if they did know they would still do them. Anjelica Huston is one of those mysterious natural forces, like gravity, that takes you into itself—with her platinum hair and hushed voice that sounds the way a head on Mount Rushmore would sound if it opened its mouth in the whipping wind.
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finally catching up to some reading and i love these three pieces so much. angelica huston as a mount rushmore head is an image i won’t soon forget! but your first piece @ JFK and the world tilting on its axis feels particularly resonant to me in this moment. in a way it ties into the last piece and makes me wonder if we will ever be inured to the shock of murder. i don’t think i will.
I enjoyed reading this. Your remarks related to "punk" align with an impression I'm getting from Debbie Harry's autobiography. Her writing is remarkably "cool." Things happen, she doesn't question or examine much, seems to accept some male behaviors without question. Yet she's got a force within her that propels her onward, in terms of her art. She was (maybe still is) one of the girls appointed as “one of the boys.” Her beauty protected her to some extent.