The Love of Strangers again

Some short films in my head.

On a trip a few years back, I met a man who said a cow had fallen on him. Actually, it was half a cow. The man’s hair was white and his face was pink. I said, “The top half or the bottom half?” I imagined the top half would be worse because of the head. You would be face to face with the door you were at some time going through. The man said the cow was sliced down the center. I said, “Like a Damian Hurst sculpture?” He said yes.

I like the awkward camaraderie of strangers at parties. We were drinking free wine and eating free falafel, and the man was talking about his days as a union organizer. He’d been working at a meat packing plant when the cow had become unhooked from a swiftly moving rack. The carcass had weighed 900 pounds. It had injured his ribs and back, and shortly after the incident, he was fired.

He remembered how sharp the knives had to be. If a knife wasn't sharp in the heavy work of cutting up a cow, you risked chopping off a piece of yourself. I could picture the knives, and I could see the men sharpening them. I love sharp knives. I don’t know how anyone can live without them. The people who live without them, when you ask if they cook what do you think they say?

I wanted to know how the cow looked and also the heavy feel of it on his body. What were the sounds in the plant. What emotions rose up when you performed these labors? What sense of competency did you feel at the tasks, and in his case, what about the stealth maneuver of being there for politics that had to lay low. These questions were outside the way the man’s mind worked. The way his mind worked was to throw itself in the path of wrongs that swallowed people up in wrongness machines.

He’d also studied Nazis and what had happened in Vietnam. He studied what people were willing to know and what they were willing to forget. He studied the distance people set up in their minds between the harms people in power did to others and how those same people in power might one day harm them.

Mart Crowley author of The Boys in the Band.

At another party some years back, I met Mart Crowley, author of the play The Boys in the Band (1968) and of the screenplay of the film (1970), about a world of gay men seesawing between self-loathing and the thrill of their secret lives. Mart was terrifically warm and fun to talk to. We were in a back garden in Manhattan, where the idea of such a place even existing makes life surprising and glamorous.

The film is still enjoyable to watch, all these years later, because the characters are connected to each other, and it’s a giddy throwback hearing everyone called, “Mary.” The thought crossed my mind how much easier it would be now for everyone to call each other “Mary.” What is your pronoun? Mary.

The sense of solidarity the characters feel makes a more vivid impression than their bitchiness and the racism-meant-as-teasing-that-never-is-just-teasing they permit themselves to express to the one Black character. The Saturday night party we look in on at Michael's snazzy, Village duplex repeats every Saturday night, we come to understand, and will end, every Saturday night, regardless of the sturm and drama, with worldly Harold saying tenderly to acid-tongued Michael, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

When you see a movie set in a past that is part of your past, you remember who you were in that period. Back then, it seemed not only that a generation was coming of age but a whole society was unzipping itself from the repression of the 1950s and sailing off toward freedom. We were able in large numbers, collectively on the streets, to end the war in Vietnam and topple a presidency. Two, actually—Johnson and Nixon. Can you imagine something like that happening now? We better imagine something like that happening now.

Do you find yourself rethinking your relationships with people? I have been doing this, lately. It’s like having a second life. In the second life, I see I was wrong about what I understood while I was living the first life. I couldn’t read social clues. I still can’t. Far better than me, Richard observes what people want and figures out how to give it to them. Being with him is like having an extended mind, like a walking stick, tap tapping to show you where you are.

My friend Bruno is writing from Mexico, where he is spending a month in a rugged outpost. Yesterday he discovered a black widow spider in his medicine cabinet and a mouse in the house where he’s staying and that he was told could be carrying the hanta virus. I admire his adventurousness. I understand why people feel bad about feeling good while the world that never was whole is suffering right in your face. That is a new thing, the immediacy of suffering we see on our phones all the time. Our phones are minds, and we are their walking sticks. At least once a day I have to remember that the dead and the harmed would want more than anything to have the aliveness and range of motion we sometimes forget to love.

Rustic chicken soup I made over the weekend, using sharp knives. If you were here, I would give you some.

Yesterday I spoke with a friend about a relationship she was in that felt wrong to her. It felt off. It was prompting her to think about it more than she wanted to. She didn’t know if she was making up a story about her meaning to the man. She didn’t know if she was making up her life in her head, moment by moment, and her impulse was to over ride what she suspected were red flags. Should she be nice to him even though he wasn’t that nice to her?

My friend was going to live her life the way she could manage living her life. I had no advice. I told her I had been in the same situation many times, and what came to mind was a relationship I had with a woman who was only a friend in an active sense for a few years but who has lived inside me for the rest of my life. As my friend talked about her relationship with the man, I saw myself trying to understand why my woman friend had cooled on me. I saw myself trying out different understandings over all the years since I’d met her in my early thirties.

In some of the understandings, this friend was just a giant, critical shit. In some of the understandings, the reasons she had cooled on me were entirely owing to my rotten disposition, and these reasons filled me with hope. If the failure was mine, I could go into the mine of my rotten disposition with a pick and an ax and dig around as long as the beams didn’t collapse.

If this woman were reading this post, she’d be unhappy and embarrassed because no one wants to have this much importance in the mind of a person they’re not tight with. It’s like realizing you have a stalker it’s going to do you no good to know about. If she ever reads this, tough luck. This is how life goes sometimes, girlfriend.

One summer, many years after we were active friends, we met in a park. We were drinking iced coffee. Small birds were by our feet looking for crumbs in the grass. Proust said friendship was too unstable to understand in a life. Or maybe he said friendship was too fragile to be interesting. Every day, there’s something to nudge into a corner with the side of your foot. Failure teaches you nothing. Actually, everything teaches you nothing, and that’s the great beauty of waking up from dreams where you are being chased.

I dream of this woman all the time. If I were capable of feeling shame, I would feel ashamed of dreaming of this woman. Here is something I just realized. In my dreams, I'm not angry or mean to people. Maybe no one is angry and mean to people in their dreams. In my dreams, I'm forgiving if a person I've lost returns. In real life as well.

I was dreaming ahead of the day of my meeting with this woman in the park. I wanted to be neither in the past or future. If you are fire, the only thing you can’t kill is another fire. My friend had once told me she liked to walk alone because she was looking for strangers to be kind to. It went okay between us. Before we parted, I wanted her to say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” as Harold says to Michael, and as my friend had said to me in the past. She didn’t say this, and she didn’t call.

The thing I want to say that may surprise you, as it does me, is I don’t want this story to have gone a different way. Had it gone a different way, had I walked side by side with this woman all the places we might have walked together, I’m sure I would not have wanted that story to have gone a different way. The reason there is a story here to tell has to do with the red flags.

Long before my friend ended our closeness without really ever ending it. It just slowed down until it was only a smudge and then not even that. I don’t enjoy memories of knowing her because of how things turned out. Long before my friend ended our closeness, there were moments of realization I was no longer in the circle. I would see it and then I would give it a different name. I created willful confusion on top of the fact that in life we don’t need willfulness to be confused. I created willful confusion not to be out in the cold entirely. Of course that doesn’t work.

This is how we behave when we have been in love and the person doesn’t love us back or has stopped loving us. The way these times make me feel and the things I do in response to the feelings, I would miss them if they were gone. If that comes as a pleasant surprise to you, not only about me but also about you, then great.

The notion that these feelings and the thoughts stirred by these feelings are something to fix or attach moral value to, whether through concepts of good and bad or through concepts of neurotic and well, all this is a cinder in the eye of contradiction as something beautiful we are and that allows us the weirdest forms of circulation in the world. We don’t suffer less by wanting less.

Capybara, lemur, dog, and cat from Flow.

A few nights ago, Richard and I watched the animated film Flow (Max), created by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, and it’s brilliant. The movie follows the tale of a cat after its home is submerged by a great flood. The kitty teams up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to steer a boat in search of dry land. Whatever this movie sounds like, words can't convey the clever beauty of the animation, the music, the sweep of the action. I thought of my behavior as dog. My aspiration was to be ever-resourceful kitty. In truth I am lemur, at a yard sale. Ooh, that's such a good bottle, ooh, I can use that mirror! There are no people in the movie. There is lots of water.

Over the weekend, Richard and I hosted two Zoom conversations fueled by love. Love for the fact we were all together and love for the fun of hearing what people would say. Each group of voices creates a collaborative improv. Making something with people who are tender with each other's feelings and who give themselves to the process produces happiness. It produces hope. It produces a place to situate yourself in physically and creatively.

That crunching sound you hear is Richard chipping away at a layer of ice glazing the deck and driveway. The last few weeks, we’ve been living in a martini shaker. You think he can be stopped? You have no idea what we're dealing with. The other day it was snowing and the sun was also shining. Richard was mean to the snow. I asked politely if he could not be so negative toward the snow, and he said, "No."

You help me. I'm not getting sucked into news that drains the marrow from my will to live. I'm going into the bathroom now to put some stuff on my face that's not expensive and promises something good I don't need to believe.

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