Bone in the Throat

The love of contradiction.

Steve Martin in his standup comedy days

I am looking down at pillows. I'm on a bed, face to face with other people, and I feel welling up compassion for the other person that may not be genuine, but let’s say it is. The person on the other pillow could be a lover, or a mate, or a friend, or someone I don't know well, or my mother. It doesn’t matter. I think to myself, Oh, wow, I can see how it must have been wearying, at the very least, knowing me.

Right now, I wouldn’t mind calling my mother back from the dead to say, “Toby, oh dear, poor you, being the mother of me, oy, I can see things more clearly now, how you must have thrown up your hands at the puzzle you had produced. Is it possible a tiny baby could have made you feel unloved?”

This morning, Richard and I were discussing the new documentary about Steve Martin (Apple TV) and the way at 75 Steve has lifted off from the sadness of his earlier life. He had a father who, when he came to a screening of The Jerk (1979), said to his son, “Well, you’re no Charlie Chaplin.” Steve is all about now, not the standup comedy and movies of his past. He's not resting on his laurels. There are never any laurels in a life, not really. That’s why all those tribute gatherings come across like a funeral you can’t laugh at. There is only the work of now and the aliveness of now, according to Steve, and I’m with him.

Richard was saying he's been a person who will stay in a long relationship and one day feel he's had enough. I asked if he thought he would bolt from me, and he said no. He would have said no, even if he were lying, because part of the way Richard situates himself with other people is to observe closely what they need to hear. I mentioned this paradox of knowing him, and he laughed. No one knows what anyone else will do. We don't even know what we will do. What's changed for both of us is that, in this moment, we don’t want to bolt.

While I am floating over my life, with real or fake compassion, I am also still chewing on old grievances, lest they go to waste. The grievances go back as far as the scenes on the pillows, and they pretty much involve being sold short. Being under-estimated. Maybe I really haven’t been underestimated as much as it seems. More likely, I am not registering on people enough to be considered of no consequence. I am not registering—not because of any special defect in me—but because most of the time people are only thinking about themselves. Mel Brooks illustrates this pillar of human mentality when he says, “Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you fall off a cliff and die.”

Many years after firing my ass from The Village Voice, the man I call Pit Bull wrote to say he was sorry he'd said mean things about my writing. I was fired in 1999 for speaking on the record to a rival newspaper about pay cuts at the Voice I thought were unfair. Pit Bull said he was sorry he'd hurt my feelings.

I wrote back—I think I wrote back, and if I didn’t write back, then I am writing back now—to say, You fired my ass and changed the direction of my life. That’s what you did, and you did it gleefully, with fangs dripping. You didn’t hurt my feelings, you moron. What makes you think your opinion of me as a writer could possibly matter to me?

This incident came swimming back the other day when I was writing here about Mike Wallace, framing his interview in 1991 with Barbra Streisand on 60 Minutes with, “I didn’t like you,” and at the end saying, “You know, I like this girl.” Barbra and I don’t give a fuck if you like us, Pit Bull, you melting stalactite in the cave of misery where in my imagination you hang. Have a nice day.

Yesterday on Facebook, a friend used the phrase “vaguely murderous,” and I thought it applied to a part of every day. I knew a woman who had a friend who lived near us in Hudson. Her friend was an artist and rather than saying to me, “Laurie, I think you and Miranda should meet, I’ll introduce you,” this woman kept urging me to buy a piece of art from her friend. On and on she went. She wanted me to be a customer! That was my role. My only role. Fuck her.

If you care why I enjoy sucking on old grievances, go to a place where I can’t see you and do your caring over there. Oh my fucking god, the fake piety of “forgiveness” this and “humble” that. The fake piety that comes swaddled in soft cashmere scarves like an endless video of Gwyneth Paltrow selling products for “self care.” Also, female humans are most often the people proclaiming their shrunken pride. Why would this be a good thing? Like women are walking around stooped under the colossal weight of their triumphs?

I like ambivalence that can’t be resolved. Without ambivalence that can’t be resolved, I would have nothing to write about and you would have nothing to laugh at while spending you life as a human being. No one rises above. There is no high road, and if there were a high road, which there isn’t—not honestly, not if you look at what it means to have emotions—if there were a high road, it would be as boring as Dante’s Paradiso. Even Milton had to concede, although he was long dead, that Blake’s crack about him being secretly of the devil’s party when he wrote Paradise Lost was correct because Milton was a writer in need of conflict (Lucifer v. God)—or else no story.

I enjoy floating over my life to see the shit I have been, and I also can’t get enough of seeing myself sold short. I like these activities because they are solitary contemplations. I’m with people who aren’t there. It’s like living in a small capsule in the arctic, where you are alone and can write, and the more you remember, the more everything turns into a happy memory, even the grievances, because you are continuing the relationships in your mind. The end.

Biz

To paid subscribers, I send you enormous thanks. You are sustaining the publication and helping keep the writing available to everyone.

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Right now, new subscribers can upgrade to paid at a monthly rate that's less than a cup of coffee, and I will keep you caffeinated every day of the month. With a subscription based business, you have to get new people in, because there is always a churn of supporters leaving. If you can, please upgrade to a paid subscription here. xxL

Tig Notaro

I love the Tig. You love, you don't love, it's up to you. Her new performance is called Hello, Again (Amazon Prime) and was recorded in Brooklyn. Her stomach begins to hurt, and in the middle of the night it's so bad she can't move, and her wife Stephanie calls 911, and a tall man with muscles out to here and fireman pants shows up, and he scoops her into his arms and carries her to an ambulance, and she's gone. She's fallen in love, and as he sweeps her out the door, she says, "Goodbye, old life."

She looks out at the crowd that adores her and knows her life story, the cancer and the podcast, the marriage and two sons she and Stephanie have, and her face is bathed in happiness, and she says, "You're shocked! Imagine how I feel." It's a gorgeous moment that rides the anarchy of the human heart with the deepest pleasure.

Zoom conversation.

The next Zoom conversation on writing craft and on the subject matter of the stack posts is on SATURDAY APRIL 13 from 3 to 4pm EST. The Zooms are joyous gatherings FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS, where you can interact with other writers and readers, and where, ahead of time, you are invited to send questions about your own writing projects. Very tender and smart people come. I can't believe the numbers of smarty pants people who show up. To RSVP and receive a link, you must send me an email at: lauriestone@substack.com. Some emails go astray, so be sure I have confirmed you. If not, I haven’t received you RSVP, so send me a message here or on FB messenger.

A Writing Workshop on JUNE 15 from 3 to 5:30pm EST.

There are two places available in the writing workshop on June 15 from 3 to 5:30pm EST. The cap on participants is 8, plus Richard and me. We all work together to create a new piece of writing in real time, and we produce a slam performance! The fee is $50 and is not refundable or transferable, if you find your plans change. To sign up for this workshop or to be placed on a list for future workshops, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

A joke for April Fool’s Day.

This joke is told by Leonard Michaels in his great essay, “My Yiddish.” https://www.threepennyreview.com/my-yiddish/ It’s a joke he considers quintessentially Yiddish:

The rabbi says to the student, “What’s green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?”

The student says, “I don’t know.”

The rabbi says, “A herring.”

The student says, “Maybe a herring could be green and hang on a wall, but it absolutely doesn’t whistle.”

The rabbi says, “So it doesn’t whistle.”

Burt Lancaster holding Ava Gardner in his hands

There are three links at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers. Please tell a friend to check out the stack. Huge thanks and love. xxL