Thursday, June 23, 2011

june; or, normal people don't live like this






Patti Smith had the best youth available to an American; of this I am convinced after reading Just Kids recently. She went to New York City instead of college (smart girl), hung out with artists, freaks, and musicians, and became famous herself, finding a new way to speak truth in the world, not an easy feat. I have always loved two of her records in particular, Easter and Horses, which includes one of the best lines in rock and roll history: “Jesus died for somebody’s sin, but not mine!” Metal as hell! Equally metal is her favorite poet, and immediately after reading the last page of her memoir, I got up, went to my bookshelf, and pulled my Complete Works of Rimbaud, one of the small handful of books I have brought and kept with me from my teenage years. I opened to my old favorite, “A Season in Hell.”

I intend to unveil all mysteries: religious mysteries or those of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, the void. I am a master of hallucinations.
       Listen!...
       I possess every talent!

Thus spake the artist.

Robert Mapplethorpe always knew he was one; Patti Smith yearned to be one, and both of them achieved their fulfillment. Maybe that’s why I think she had the best youth available to an American, quirky midnight adventures with fascinating people aside—because she actually did that thing, that rare and wonderful thing, of becoming, actualizing, fulfilling, conjuring, discovering herself—however you want to put it. How often does that really happen? How many people do you know who have taken the fool’s leap into selfhood, really? By selfhood, I mean the thing you want to be, the magnificent thing you know you can be if it weren’t for all the traps and pitfalls and fears we are fraught with in the waking nightmare of everyday existence. That sounds pretty negative and phantasmagoric, but I often think of life as a waking dream, so it makes sense that it should also be a nightmare sometimes. Either way, so much of life is in our heads, and when most people collectively dream the same dream, that is called the norm. It takes a powerful dreamer to resist the norm, and I know quite a few powerful dreamers.

My wonderful friend Jen had a fancy dinner with an investment banker last week, during which he berated her because she’s closer to fifty than forty and has no IRA, investment portfolio, 401K, or retirement plan. He told her she needed to move to a city and earn twice as much money; when she told him that she wanted to be a writer, he said, “Well, that’s not safe. It’s a long shot that you’ll make it as a writer.” Thanks a lot, DAD! She told me that she came away from that fancy restaurant feeling fearful and deeply irresponsible. The grotesque irony that an investment banker had the audacity to make my deeply scrupulous and admirable friend feel irresponsible aside, I hate this story because it’s illustrative of all the ways we fuck ourselves through fear into living lives we hate. I’m not going to sing a paean to poverty or anything—that’s a little naive, I suppose—but I have always found it easy to admire hobos, beggars, street maniacs, and gypsies for their lifestyle choices. I’ve had a special affinity with them that has more than once manifested in my cooking dinner for them while they smoke cigarettes in my bathroom. They have given the finger to “financial security” with their whole lives, all their selfhood.

What is life for? Why do we even have it? Whatever the answer is, I doubt it’s anything to do with being safe, whatever that really means anyway. I mean we’re all going to die, which is sort of the ultimate unsafe thing to do. I don’t want to be old, alone, and poor—how wretched! And I know it’s important to organize your time in the present so as to be the person you want to be in the future (although there’s nothing fail proof about that, as I’ve discovered). But still, I am repulsed by the notion of living a whole life—all those hours at a job, all those decisions about how to spend your money and your time, all the ways these decisions change you, minutely, meaning minute by minute, in barely perceivable ways until you’ve made a monster of yourself, a monster wearing obscenely overpriced pink shorts and talking about golf as though it’s actually interesting...

Oh, God. Oh, man. Maybe golf is interesting and I don’t know it. I’m probably being a bitch right now, sucked into this pointless contest of rich against poor. Jen and I have much in common, and one of those things is we each have much more experience working in fancy restaurants than eating in them. I’ve eaten in my share, thankfully—I love eating in fancy restaurants. I also kind of love working in them, even though it’s not a highly respected or particularly well-paid job. My restaurant right now is in convenient proximity to a very posh boarding school—ok, I’ll just say it—Deerfield FUCKING Academy, and after just working graduation weekend, I’m feeling ornery about rich people. My instincts tell me that rich people are just like us except they have more money, but now I’m doubting that. I think rich people have genetically and culturally modified themselves so as not to be like us. At Deerfield Academy, sixteen-year old boys wear pink shorts without fear of being thought pansies and refer to their dining experiences at our restaurant as “sub-par.” This strikes me as unnatural, but I can’t pinpoint why. Although only about 19% of American women are born blonde, about 95% of the teenage girls at Deerfield have shoulder-length, healthy blonde hair. They meticulously special-order food and then push it around their plates until we take it from them and throw it out. They and their parents are frighteningly tall. They talk about their wealth obsessively, what they’ve bought, where they’ve gone, how their stocks are doing, as though they’re afraid to forget about it for even a second. The most interesting conversation I overheard all weekend was about how the cops came into somebody’s mansion where there was some underage drinking going on and arrested the parents, and this story resolved itself in lawyer fees the size of which literally made my head swim for a moment. Rich people can buy their way out of problems that shipwreck the majority of us on truly desolate shores. More than once this weekend, tight-lipped parents asked me to pour wine for their seventeen-year olds, and although I’m not really averse to kids that age drinking wine at dinner, I don’t want to be slapped with a $1,000 fine and bring the same on my boss. That actually happened to Jen once. $2,000 might seem to these people a reasonable amount to pay to ensure that their kids can have wine with dinner in a restaurant—I should’ve asked. Instead I asked to see their i.d.’s, and was met with frigid, blue-eyed stares from everyone at the table. Fucking WASPS.

I don’t want to be a hater, but my opinion is that people that wealthy cannot help but be fucked up. Lucky me—I have a proven immunity to wealth. Some people in the Middle Ages never contracted the Bubonic Plague regardless of their exposure. Apparently, the ancestors of these people have a genetic immunity to the HIV virus. I myself have been blessed with good health, and the Chinese have a saying that “Health is wealth,” but I seem to be unable to contract even the slightest symptoms of the American strain of wealth. I am, however, quite excellent at getting work that doesn’t pay, the most admiring of bosses, as a matter of fact, regretfully cannot pay me anything at all. I’m volunteering with ESOL speakers, and looking into setting type for free on the antique letterpress in the basement of the Massachusetts Renaissance Center (heaven on earth), and last month I got a great job writing for an online arts and culture magazine called The Free George. Even though they can’t pay me, I am genuinely excited about it, and it feels good to have people who don’t even know me compliment my writing. In the restaurant biz, we call this the “verbal tip.” You know, “everything was wonderful—you are so terrific—thank you for taking such good care of us...” and then they leave a tip hovering at about 12%. My father says that waiting tables is the one job where your pay is in direct proportion to the quality of service you provide, and falser words were never spoken. There are good tippers and bad tippers, and it has more to do with the character of the customer than with the service of the wait staff. I would never leave a tip less than 20% of the bill including wine and tax. That’s not a good tip but simply de rigueur in a civilized society. To leave anything less is stealing, stealing a person’s time and their labor.  There’s something disgraceful about people treating themselves to luxuries and not adequately compensating those who have provided them with the experience. Still, the verbal tip is sometimes acceptable, and it certainly is for me in this Free George situation. I get to publish my writing and build a writer’s résumé, and hopefully I’ll get a paid job writing somewhere down the road. That’s what I want—my fulfillment—to write and be paid for it, and in so doing, create worlds to counter the one in which boys in pink shorts and starving, blonde girls play at being Masters of the Universe. That’s what artists do, like gods in miniature—create new worlds.

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.

Sidney says “poet,” but I don’t think he’d mind if we used the word “artist,” since he’s not distinguishing poetry from the other arts, but from the more worldly disciplines of history and philosophy (yes, there was a time—pre modern science—when these were considered the most practical arenas of human thought and endeavor). If I don’t interview well, and I don’t, it’s because I can’t make myself believe in the brazen world of 401K’s, golf, and office politics, and that lack of faith becomes subverted in deep self-effacement, a manifestation of doubt about myself. Actually, it’s more complicated than that. I reign so surely and gracefully in the golden world of my own creation, that I don’t want to intimidate or frighten these poor peasants of the imagination wearing expensive suits and deciding the financial fates of those around them, myself included. After years on the academic market, I’ve been on a hundred job interviews, and not once have I failed to pity the people interviewing me, so my effacement doesn’t come from deep humility (as it properly should), but from a deep belief in my own richness and power, so abundantly evident that I fear it will make others feel badly about themselves. Is this twisted?

Listen!...
       I possess every talent!

I often feel the same when waiting tables; in the restaurant, I am the one with the power. I can contribute to the magic and romance of a few hours of people’s lives while they are ultimately powerless to affect me in any way. My dignity is unassailable, and if they are rude or inappropriate with me, they only screw themselves out of the fullness of the experience I can give them. If they stiff me, it doesn’t matter because someone else is sure to overtip me. Restaurants are magical places; anyplace where nourishing, beautiful food is conscientiously prepared and presented is a place of profound human import and value, and anyone who fails to feel connected to the deepest resonances of life and our essential kinship to one another in such a place lives in a sad and stony castle indeed. As much as I love eating in gorgeous restaurants, when I am working in mine, knowing what I know, I wouldn’t change places with any one of the customers. Sitting at an elegant table with succulent dishes being brought to me by gracious servers of unearthly beauty is great, no doubt, but not as great as hanging out in the back of the house with Michelle, Jamie, Jessica, Paul, John, Lucian, Marc, Hilton, Karen, Franco, Steven, and Nick. Honestly. The back of the house is full of more wit, intelligence, grace, beauty, talent, education, kindness, and friendship than the front of the house on any given night. We have a small serving staff: three gay, artistic men, three independent, hotsy-totsy women, and one ridiculously handsome, underage busboy. It’s a recipe for a lot of salacious humor. One of the things that three gay men and three solidly heterosexual women have in common is that none of us enjoy being on the giving end of cunnilingus—we’ve discussed this at some length. The most onerous task of the servers is to polish the silverware, big, scalding piles of silver sometimes encrusted with gross, no longer identifiable food bits, and given how little we enjoy this job, it’s now referred to as cunnilingus (actually we use another phrase that I can’t bring myself to write here). Cunnilingus is a part of my work night, every night, but still I’d rather be performing cunnilingus with Paul and Michelle, sipping from our wine glasses, nibbling on prawns, and cracking jokes, than working in an office somewhere pretending to be Master of the Universe.

One busy night last summer, a strange, tall woman came up to each of the servers inquiring about a book she’d left on the patio. She described the size of the book and the graphic on the cover but was reticent to name the title. None of us had seen it, but we promised to keep it for her should it surface—what was the title of the book? Reluctantly, she told us: Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Mm-hmn. Ok. She came back about an hour later to tell us with great relief that she’d found the book lying in the middle of the street. So apparently it’s true: normal people don’t live like this—who hasn’t had that thought in the wild disquiet of objective self-reflection? And is it something to lament or celebrate?

       I am a master of hallucinations.

We all live in worlds of our making, some of us rich, some of us poor, some of us deeply and truly grateful even while performing cunnilingus, some of us unable to appreciate exquisite food and ambience when it’s laid at our feet by angels vested in human flesh. I like my restaurant job, but it doesn’t draw on all my talents, and so I am not going to reach my fulfillment there. I suck at interviews. I have a first draft of a best seller—I know it—and this month I’ll get busy on revision, to reveal to myself the beauteous world I’ve created and prepare it for immersion into the wider world. I intend to unveil all mysteries...