Evidence of Life
"I know the world is going to end but I was thinking of getting a slow cooker." –Marga Gomez on Facebook
In the days when I was catering, I liked to work what was called “sanit,” short for sanitation. You scraped dirty plates handed to you by waiters, one in each hand, bing bop, scraped them into giant garbage bins, you stored the plates and glasses in plastic lugs, you hauled bottles and garbage this way and that. The work produced the fatigue I am always looking for. I didn’t like to ask for the job too often. It didn’t seem fair because it required a lot of heavy lifting, and mainly men did the work who were stronger than me. Those nights you would push past whatever place you thought you were supposed to get to, and then you would stand outside in the quiet city looking at stars in the dark sky. Who knows what I do when I’m supposed to be asleep.
People ask me if I miss New York. Maybe they are asking if I miss them. Last summer when we visited, the city was vibrating. My conversations with people were vibrating. In a bodega, a man wearing a bandana was mopping the floor. When I came in, he called me mami, and I called him popi, and I said, "I love when people call me mami," and he said, "I love to be called popi. My mother calls me popi." We fell in love the way you fall in love with strangers in NYC. The waitress at the cafe where we went was full of the beautiful, young pleasure of giving good service. I had a negroni. Friends we met had IPA beers, and we shared buffalo cauliflower and some kind of crazy delicious dish of Brussels sprouts. It was happy hour on the street. The world rapturously swirled by on Second Avenue.
When I say to Richard, “I love you,” I mean I’m happier with you than I think I've been with anyone else. But of course, how would I know something like that? The past is stray cats, and I live in the moment. That's why I don't miss the things I once was and the places I once went to. When I read old notebooks, I'm startled by the specificity of interiors and landscapes that zoom back into focus, as if I can feel the emotions of that past time, too. Such is the enchantment of language.
In the late 70s and early ‘80s, I learned to tap dance with two friends under the tap professorship of a brilliant avant-garde dancer, who had studied with some of the greats, among them Buster Brown and Honi Coles. A few minutes ago, I watched a video of Honi performing a Bill Robinson routine that happened to be one our teacher taught us. We had classes in a splintery loft and danced to music on a boom box. One time, our teacher devised a dance to Sting singing “There’s a little black spot on the sun today.” I can feel the steps.
My friends were experienced dancers and very glamorous. I had not danced before. We were getting to know each other. We would drink afterward in Fanelli's, which was right across the street in Soho. One of my friends wore leg warmers that bagged around her ankles like in Flash Dance. I had never seen so much chic before, and it reminded me of my days at Woodmere Academy, where all the girls knew to wear Pappagallo loafers with leather soft as butter. I loved looking up to people who knew more than I did about everything. I still love that feeling.
I love the color gray. I love the beauty of indeterminacy. With certain people I have lost, I run my hand up and down my front to see if I still feel heat rising off. I wonder if one day I’ll feel they’ve given me all I need. The thing that curbs your connection to another person is an animal you can’t catch. Suddenly it’s gone, and you don’t go looking for it. This has seldom happened to me.
In “My Gentile Region” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2021) Gary Shteyngart writes about a botched circumcision, performed when he was seven and had emigrated to the United States from Soviet Russia. Attempts to correct the surgery in later life fail, stirring a contemplation of the author’s fragile male parts. Shteyngart writes with customary wit and candor, sadness and beauty, detailing pain that cannot be resolved. There is careful observation of the penis in the writing. Not so much careful observation of women in the writing. Early on, he writes, “I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening.”
Gary! To heterosexual women—and I speak for all of them—the penis is not any kind of marine mammal. The penis is a confidant you can speak to, a hand puppet, a sculptural ornament you can shift around—especially in the morning, with its bump of hello before it wanders off to make tea. It is beautiful and tasty, more than a dildo made of flesh. It is a friend I wouldn’t know what to do without, although I have done without it for considerable periods or time, and when, after a long absence, it has again poked out from a pair of trousers, I have felt a peace wash over me.
Near where I live is a woman I visit every so often, a gardener, who shares her dahlia tubers with me. They have names, the various dahlias. The first time I went to see her, she gave me Mrs. Eileens, which turned out to produce giant blossoms, as large as a face.
The gardener and I know only little bits about each other from the dahlia visits. Each one is a shot in a movie, forming a montage. One day last summer, she wasn’t feeling well and needed help watering her garden and the garden of her neighbor, and I did it for her. As we went around the plants, she told me she had spent the winter skiing in Montana, the whole winter, and that she had driven her car there and back by herself, and that she was 86.
When I heard this, I thought I should go skiing as soon as it snowed again. I should rent skis in one of the ski places up here, unless they have all melted from global warming, and I should point the skis down and just go. I used to dream about skiing long past the time when I really skied. Skiing represented sex, or freedom. The kind of freedom you feel in a country where you are a stranger or with a friend who doesn’t know you.
It’s interesting to retrace the steps of your former sensibility, the sensibility that was the we of the times you lived in, reversing the path of the breadcrumb trail to find the fledgling standup that might have been leaning against a wall before you became the you du jour. How many steps were there?
“How much did they pay you?” my mother would ask, when she opened a magazine and saw my name. Would I tell her the truth? I think I did. Did she ask any other questions about the piece? If she did, I don’t remember them. She probably did. I don’t remember them because of too much early heat or cold.
The thing I want to tell you is how proud I was of being paid anything. I didn’t have to teach. I only had to write. I was never paid much. I made enough to get by. Expensive sunglasses. The sales at Charivari. A rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side. The medical plan at the Village Voice. Free food at openings. You could go every night.
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Cold
Guest post by
Except for my years in Arizona, I have felt cold every winter since I was a child. When I went downstairs this morning, after leaving the cozy cocoon of our bed, I felt that shiver go through me that’s a wormhole back to Blackpool.
In the 1950s, our family would fill grandma and grandad Brooks’s tiny terraced house. Brother Roy and I slept in the attic, sharing a double bed that was never warm, even with hot water bottles at our feet. I’d wake with a chill and climb down the ladder to join dad in his striped pajamas and dressing gown, as he was building a fire in the grate with a few lumps of coal and twisted newspaper.
I realize now, these were the few moments he wanted to be alone, in the same way I wanted him for myself, without my brother or sister or any of the rest of the family. After getting the fire going, Dad would get dressed and slip out to the sea front. It was still very early. He’d get there before the crowds of holiday makers, before the trams were clanging along the promenade, before the amusement arcades were flashing their lights and drowning out the wind and seagulls with pop music of the day by Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Marty Wild, Cliff Richards.
The only place open as the sun was rising was a kiosk on the sea front selling giant, steaming-hot mugs of tea. Dad really wanted this solitude, too, but if I was awake early enough he’d always welcome my company. The mug of tea was burning my fingers and scalding to drink. The wind blew in bitterly from the Irish Sea. We would turn our backs to drink it. I was 8, maybe. It was before I was anything really, before any self awareness. For a second or two this morning, I was there again, wrapped in the overcoat my Dad had made me, wearing the balaclava grandma had knitted to keep my ears warm. The tea mug was so big, it was hard to handle. I didn’t like it much, but I wanted to have it.
In my 20s, tripping on LSD, I felt I had traveled back in time. I was a gamekeeper. I don’t know how I knew this, and there was a shotgun hanging on the back of a wooden door. The room had a flagstone floor. I looked out a window to a snow-covered garden. There were slivery traces of frost like ferns on the windows. While tripping, I felt the familiar chill of cold down my back. I felt this chill in the house I lived in with a girlfriend in Leeds and in another house with a different woman in Otley. Sometimes, when I turn over in bed or if Laurie moves the down comforter and cool air slips in, I feel these times again. I feel they are dreaming me.
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Laurie, the pyrotechnics of your column today had me smiling and then tearing up and then smiling again. Every single thing you wrote was wonderful. And, oh my god, the penis, the penis. You told Gary S a thing or two that he needed to know. During this head-exploding week of political mayhem, I am so grateful for where you take us. I was also grateful for where Richard took us today, too. Thank you both.
Thank you both. I have no great memories of penises or fathers. But my old husband - we didn't know each other pre-65, and we're in our mid-80s, now, but I look at a photo of him in his 40s, one of those old sepia jobs, and the man I see is the one whose penis I'd never ever forget. Gives me the shivers. He's beautiful at 85, and sweet and loving as no one ever has been before, with me. But oh you guy! How many times do we live in? And each one can be such fun.