The Ohio Experiment
Remembering a time not NOW.
The Ohio Experiment
I’m remembering a time I stepped out of myself to enter a culture that was alien enough to change me. It was only a few states away from New York. It was Ohio, and people I knew in New York thought that, for the months I’d be there, I’d pine for my big, eventful city. The people I knew were wrong although not wrong to have had these thoughts. I surprised them because I surprised myself.
I was happy being a person no one knew, so I could become someone I hadn’t been before, a person who could be pleased with things as they are. Often, I don’t know how much is the right amount to make of a person or an event. Maybe I learned to there. I’m remembering this time because it’s not NOW. When you can’t go through something, go around it.
In 2002, I drove to Columbus to be a writer-in-residence at Thurber House. The gig included an apartment on the top floor of the nondescript, three-story house where famous woman-hater James Thurber had lived. It sat on a forlorn street, near two highways and a thinly populated business zone.
The car I was driving belonged to my friend Andy, who in her youth had been a Downtown waif but during her years in Los Angeles had become a real estate mogul. She had houses and cars on both coasts. This car, a dark blue Subaru, had been sitting at her house in the Adirondacks. “Take it,” she said.
There was no traffic in Columbus, no noise. Gigantic parking lots yawned outside space station supermarkets, and inside were unattended bins of candy. The local yoga studio was an airy loft instead of a packed A-train. On the streets in Columbus, the first thing people did was smile at you. It felt good. One day on the campus of Ohio State University, I saw a squirrel eating a corn on the cob under a tree, a whole ear in its paws, and I pointed it out to a student, and she stopped to watch it with me for a long time. Another day, the touchpad on my laptop died while I was preparing a talk, so I called a fixit place, and a guy told me to come over right away. Hank was his name, a fuzzy-haired hipster, and not only did he clear his decks to help me, he invited me to watch him fiddle with the wires, and he repaired the computer by that afternoon.
When I set out for Ohio on a late March afternoon, the air was mild and I felt suspended. I liked driving through the night, me and the truckers. Every few hours I stopped to stretch my legs and back. Around three in the morning, I pulled into a motel outside Wheeling, West Virginia. It looked decent from the road, but there were dark, curly hairs in the bathtub. The blanket was made of pressed pieces of lint that looked like delicatessen meat you would never want to know the name of.
In Columbus, everything closed around midnight, except for a bar my friend Angeles and I discovered. Angeles was Mexican-American and had grown up in a border town between Texas and Mexico. She was an actor and was working on an MFA in theater at OSU. Her body, like mine, became animated when she talked. She was a piece of New York in Ohio—tummling, Latin, unreserved, and warm. One day, after working out together in the gym, we were cruising a market that smelled of granola and where people wore Birkenstocks. We were talking fast when a fellow came out from behind the deli counter and slowly asked us if we needed help. He thought we were deaf, because we were using our hands so much when we talked. I said, “What, in Ohio, there’s no movement allowed above the waist?” He said, “Not unless you’re reporting a death.”
In Columbus, I had a class of students to teach writing to. I had Angeles and other friends. I was happy in Ohio partly because of Angeles or mainly because of Angeles. On a voyage out, you only need one person to sit next to on the bus and walk beside on the trail. How my career would go, or how I would earn money in the future, or who I would love were concerns over there. We’re not supposed to like falling, but it’s relaxing sometimes not being attached to anything.
In New York, I used to practice yoga with a man named Floyd. His shoulders, forearms, wrists, and calves were tattooed with tribal designs, wreaths, and snaking shapes. His ears were pierced up and down, as was an eyebrow and his tongue. Whatever other body jewelry he wore didn’t show out of the loose pants and tunic he wore. He was bald and thin as a reed, with a wide, toothy smile.
He began his classes with a chant. The assembled on sticky mats joined in. If someone came out of a pose before the end of his count, he repeated the pose and extended it longer for everyone. Bodies grew slick with sweat, as he moved around the mats, extending an arm, stepping on a hand or a thigh. As the poses became more rigorous, he pressed people into deeper stretches, draping his body over a man or a woman in a seated forward fold or braiding his limbs through theirs in a twisting posture. The contact was intimate, yet respectful. “Play with your edge,” he’d say, meaning the space between pain that was tolerable and what comes next. He was a sadist, and I could see why people flocked to his studio. They liked taking a vacation from deciding things.
There are questions I’ll never know the answers to. One day my mother said, “Daddy’s father had a wagon and a horse and went around as a pedlar.” Where did this happen? When? What did he sell? Everyone who could possibly know is dead. In America, my grandfather pressed pants in a clothing factory in the garment center of New York City.
There’s a place in New York where the river is right there and you can sit on rocks and watch the water lap against the granite. You can sit under a tree and look at ducks paddling in a circle, their iridescent feathers catching light, and at swooping gulls breaking the surface of the Hudson The sky is brilliantly blue between clouds that hang over the horizon. You can tell yourself to breathe and let the moment be what it is. One day, I sat there with a friend, and we talked about a time I’d come to visit him on Block Island and how we’d ridden our bikes around the entire circumference of the island and stopped for drinks at a hotel on the edge of the water. The visit had been mysterious and brimming, and we liked remembering it without knowing what it meant. How can it be we mean so much to each other when we don’t know each other.
While I was in Columbus, I began a flirtation with a man on line. We emailed and spoke on the phone and in time arranged to meet. He lived a fair distance away, and I said I would drive there to have dinner and stay in a hotel. When I told Angeles, she said, “He has to pay for your dinner.” I said, “I don’t let men pay for me, especially if I don’t know them.” “Cabrona, no, I insist. I get the sexual politics, but you are driving there and making this big effort and you’ll have to spend money to stay over, so he has to pay for your dinner, or else he has a bad character, and he’s not right for you.” I drove to where he lived and enjoyed meeting the man, although I felt no attraction. At dinner, when the bill arrived, he didn’t offer to pay, instead tallied his portion, and I thought Angeles was right.
When I returned to my city, I kept our Ohio inside me and felt less lonely. We are still friends. She lives far away. She’s met Richard but hasn’t yet visited our house.
We watched Eyes Wide Shut (1999) the other night, Kubrick’s final film, starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and inarticulable kabuki what is wrong with you, Stanley, how could you be so out of touch, Stanley, that is also not boring. I can’t get the Shostakovich waltz out of my head. There are worse ear worms. A friend once described me as an ear worm in neither an admiring nor an unfriendly way. I digress.
You know the story. There is no story. Kubrick had to hire erotic coaches for Tom and Nicole, who were then married, because their physical scenes together were tree stumps.
[Yes, yes, I know the screenplay is based on the novella Dream Story (1926) (German: Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler. It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about Kubrick.]
The people in the movie who look like they’re having fun, even forlorn fun, are the naked women. There are tons of them, and they all have the same body type, which is Nicole’s body type. Long long legs, very thin, tight bottoms, full breasts, cascading tendrils of pre-Raphaelite red hair. Nicole is naked a lot, too. Tom hardly gets to take off his jacket.
All the women in the movie want Tom and Tom doesn’t get to take off his jacket because the movie is one long odyssey of interruptus. I knew a woman at the time the movie came out who wrote to me to say she thought the film was brilliant and would I write about it to that effect. She was a shrink and pretty famous and had written about female sexuality.
I said to her about the movie are you out of your mind, but this time watching it, 25 years later, I could see how someone might be entranced. There are long long pauses between the idiotic lines of dialogue people exchange, and you fall into the silences and the spaces. You fall into Kubrick rabbit holes, and you look for a little bottle that says, “Drink me,” and you drink it, and then you look for a plate of cookies that says, “Eat me,” and you eat one.
You have all the time in the world to wish you had a body like the women in the movie. Really, it’s the greatest fantasy. I am feeling it now. Even the woman pulled out of a drawer in the morgue looks great. Gray but great.
CYBER MONDAY SALE 40% DISCOUNT ENDS AT MIDNIGHT MONDAY DECEMBER 2 (Could you be more tacky? Yes!)
Paid subscribers receive invitations to monthly Zoom conversations about writing craft, where you get to send ahead questions about your own writing projects.
You receive access to the complete archive of 200 + pieces.
You receive invitations to work together on a one-to-one basis on your writing as well as on how to start and grow a Substack publication.
For today, a paid subscription costs $30 a year and $3 a month.
Recently Lit Hub named Everything is Personal one of the seven best literary publications on Substack. We are changing the way writers produce literature and readers find it.
This space will remain apart from blame, theories, and noise.
I don’t have a pay wall. I will never have a paywall. Everyone says you can’t sustain a subscription business without a paywall. Please prove them wrong.
IF YOU HAVE BEEN ENJOYING THE POSTS FOR A WHILE, PLEASE TAKE A TURN AT BECOMING A PAID SUBSCRIBER. IT’S THE ONLY WAY THIS STACK CAN CONTINUE.
EXTRA ZOOM CONVERSATION HAS BEEN ADDED ON SATURDAY DECEMBER 7 from 3 to 4 EST. RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com
You are invited to talk with other writers and artists about continuing to do your work in the NOW. Many people I’ve been speaking with feel stopped and uncertain of how to create in this moment. Richard Toon and I will be hosting an extra Zoom on SATURDAY DECEMBER 7 from 3 to 4 EST for people to talk to each other. We will moderate and listen. We want to give people permission to be where they are and move elsewhere when they see an opening. Sometimes to go forward, you can stop. To RSVP, please email me here: lauriestone@substack.com
The next ZOOM Conversation for Paid subscribers on writing craft is on Saturday December 28 from 3 to 4 EST.
To RSVP, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com
Please send ahead questions about your own writing projects and anything you’ve read in the stack.
Also for paid subscribers: If you would like a recording of the last Zoom Conversation on writing in the Comic Voice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com
Every sentence has a biography. Every sentence tells you about the life of the narrator through their vocabulary, their inclusion of foreign words, their syntax, grammar, and punctuation, their comic outlook, the music in their cadences. These elements swirl into a distinctive sound with the ability to seduce the reader into continuing. How do you make written language register with the immediacy and intimacy of spoken language?
LIVE ZOOM TALK FOR MY FIVE THINGS
Richard and I have rescheduled our upcoming LIVE ZOOM TALK, presented by My Five Things for Sunday, DECEMBER 22 from 8 to 10PM EST. It’s called, “How to write a seductive first sentence”—about feeling pleasure as you write and producing pleasure for the reader. After you register, you can attend the live talk and also watch the video as often as you like. Everyone is invited.
Here is the link register and to learn more about our talk: https://myfivethings.com/class/how-to-write-a-seductive-sentence/
Working together one-on-one for Paid Subscribers.
If you would like to work with me on your writing on a one-to-one basis, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The first conversation of about 10 minutes is free for paid subscribers, to establish whether I am the right person to guide your work.
I can also help you start and grow a Substack publication for an hourly fee as well. There is no free introductory conversation for this service.
THERE ARE THREE LINKS at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers, and I love hearing your thoughts about the posts! REALLY
“Not unless you’re reporting a death.” has to be one of the best replies in the history of Ohio.
“Brimming.” Arresting word to use of a visit. Also loved the blanket made of pressed pieces of lint.