Who They Imagine I Am

Short of stature, small in talent, reserved and reticent, over-dressed in blazer and black sweater, ambiguously ethnic and generally without flourish or flair, I somehow have a strange way of causing others to admire and imitate my habits. A barback asked after my brand of white v-neck, and the next week turned up in Polo, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was because I have no money that I buy discount three-packs to get by for the summer—they go easily with my one threadbare blazer. The German PhD students I sometimes play pool with, who I call the Germans, have taken to ordering my drink, which they call “the Copperman,” and I gather that they don’t understand that I drink Monolopowa and soda with a lime because the potato vodka is the best I can afford, cheap here by some accident of tariff or supply, not because there is some magic in the drink—it is simple and clean and tastes like citrus, and it isn’t sweet, but they would do better to buy microbrew or any of a dozen better drinks than the one I fall back on to keep from drinking myself broke. The old, bright, solitary machinist who once was a regular at the bar I went to when I was a graduate student regularly writes me cryptic Facebook messages at late hours, asking me odd questions about William Blake and punctuation and the inevitability of despair. The Contractor I often hang out with at the bars, loudspoken and brazenly skirtchasing, for some bizarre reason asked after the make and material of my one scarf, as if there was anything stylish in burgundy and cotton blend, and as he makes a lot of money and buys only designer I cannot really conceive of what it is he seeks to know. The best bar pool player in town insisted I was his first choice in forming a pool league team, and that too makes no sense: he is far, far better than I am, both accurate and possessing of cue control, while I dally with a little English and play best the less hard I try. All of them seem to think that I possess some quality they wish to acquire by proximity or imitation. And though I am more self-aware than Singer, the mute of Carson McCuller’s great novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” whose attentive silence was construed as comprehension of and compassion concerning the secret longing of others, I have the sense that my own odd accommodations to this town I don’t belong in has caused some similar misconceptions.

People mistake my constant standing as a sign of vigor and energy, not understanding that sitting for more than an hour like a normal person makes my back hurt. They mistake my solitary habits in this town my close friends have all moved from for self-possession, a fundamentally insular confidence they wish to acquire, when in fact I am mostly lonely, and encounter those people out in public venues I have come to in order to be near to others. They mistake my reluctance to try to take home young girls from the bar for decency and honor, not understanding that I am as lustful as the next fellow, but stay away from hot and 21 in the spirit of self-preservation: experience has taught me that I will apparently forego all sense for a beautiful woman, and surely I don’t need to deal with such immaturity all over again. They mistake my general kindness for some larger virtue I surely do not possess at all—I have my weaknesses, and god knows, my regrets. I have my shameful secrets, no worse than those that all of us harbor, but surely no better. Yet despite the truth, it seems that others require me to possess some ineffable merit, to be inhumanely excellent, and that expectation has become a burden also: more people I may finally disappoint. I do not want to be the end of their faith anymore than I want to be the repository of their hopes and secret longings, but I fear I am both—for they seek me out, too, to reveal what they want and need, and because it is my nature to find the flat bottom of narrative, so it is that I know that the contractor takes home the young girls with the platinum hair and fake breasts because his heart was broken by a woman he made a house for, and so now he looks for sex where there is no risk of falling in love. I know that the barback was cheated on by his last girlfriend, and that now he lacks the courage to really go after the women he wants, so that he spends his late nights perusing the internet’s endless queue of porn until he passes out and wakes feeling sad and ashamed. I know that one German is secretly OCD and will not come to the bar on weekends when he might actually meet a woman because the bar does not have a bathroom that locks and he cannot piss when anyone else is in the room, and so he has gone a year single. I know that the other German is secretly a little in love with a friend who has a boyfriend, that once years ago they kissed and he is filled with guilt and lust every time he sees the girl and her boyfriend, just as he is filled with guilt and dread every time the young girl he dated in Germany texts him about their love, which is not love but devotion, which he knows is unreciprocal but allows to persist because it is comforting to think that there is at least one person in the world who holds him dear. I know that the pool player has never really thrown off his origins in trailer park and small stature, at the bottom of it finally still a scared boy who was endlessly backed into corners, and much of what he struggles with is his tendency to self-sabotage, him willfully forcing out more proof of his inadequacy when in fact he is a good man. I know that the machinist, who is in his forties and looks older from hard living, went to Reed for a year, where he took up mastery of pool at the college bar and failed out in a year despite having a genius level IQ, and I know that he falls in love with every female bartender who is kind to him, knowing full well that they are nice only because it is in their interest but unable to keep himself from wishing, from wanting to be touched by a woman, which he hasn’t been in years. What I know is—too much. Or too little, and not enough, to misparaphrase Vallejo.

Bearing all those stories, and having all of these sad men look to me for inspiration and answers, I do not know what to do, and so I say only what I can.

“Have another Copperman,” I tell the Germans. “And go talk to that girl.”

“Buy cashmere, and for fuck’s sake, call a cab,” I tell the Contractor.

“Talk to my friend the ballerina, and be your best self,” I tell the pool player.

“Blake has no answers, but asks the right questions,” I tell the bar regular, knowing that there is little else I can say.

One day soon, I will leave these people, and they will all be alright. That is what I tell myself, anyway--- that they will be fine.

That we all will.

Barry Hannah, Willa Cather

I told myself, last night, that I would write even if the result is only self-indulgence and absurdity, empty poetic language and redundant melancholy longing. I have been stuck museless and mute for the last month, except for the occasional bout of satire, reading Barry Hannah and Willa Cather and wishing for more inspiration and certainly more talent. Hannah is loud, explosive, transgressive, pitiless, and often brilliant in an entirely original and unreplicable way. Cather’s prose is lyric and graceful and precise, weighted with the authority that retrospection can bring, and her narrators face what time has made of memory—what was important and beautiful, what we cannot have back.

Both I admire an awful lot, but I find myself finally more taken with Cather than with Hannah—I am never bored in reading Hannah, but I am only moved in his occasional quiet work that has a feel of looking back through time (“Testimony of Pilot,” for example, and his fishing story about a boy dragged into the surf by what took for a moment his line, and how he held onto that story and that time in his youth). I look to Hannah and his talent with awe; I aspire to the clarity and size of Cather’s work at her best, which has—resonance? Heart? – a sort of purity of gaze, as if what she wrote and kept was only what was at the bottom of something she cared deeply about. Hannah is punch-drunk with language and the intensity and acceleration of what mad and absurd collision he has imagined and realized, and so I am endlessly entertained. Cather is singing quietly to herself in the dark with the voice she has, which she doesn’t herself think of as beautiful but which is better still for that lack of self-regard, and hearing her, I want to write.

Christmas has come, and gone, and now it is the day after, all artifice stripped from that most commodified of holidays in the frantic aftermath of exchange and supersale, the malls teeming, the only imminent change now the onset of temporary hopefulness proferred by the night of greatest inebriation, which will be followed by the morning of greatest hangover. And so perhaps I can be forgiven for a lack of holiday enthusiasm at the moment, though my Christmas was merry enough, a day of parents and nephews and needed winter coats, and then finally the sort of feast that oversates and ensures the need for New Year's resolutions regarding waistline. Not a bad day, but I couldn't shake the sense that the world is moving while I stand still. In the morning, before I went to my parent's house, I went by Starbucks, the only open coffee vendor, and ran into an old friend from high school who lives now in Oakland, a loudspoken and assertive Jew who's the daughter of the local Rabbi.

"Are you visiting?" she asked. "What are you doing? What's new?"

Because I have come past the point where I can use the line about doing the same things the same ways and expecting different results, one of many definitions of insanity, I shrugged.

She went on to offer some good advice concerning single-minded pursuit of success, perhaps not really realizing that single-minded pursuit is the one thing I do well. She meant well. She was right to suggest I move South to sunnier climes. What I most took away, in the pre-coffee blur, was her energy and conviction and the sense that she, at least, was away doing while I stay, sustaining. Not her fault or intention, but the way I feel nonetheless. When I went out last night with my brother, the one open bar was full of people he went to high school with who'd come back for the holidays, but there was not a single person from my high school years-- people in their thirties have begun to establish their own families and to have other obligations beyond the town they were born in.

"Come to the Bay," my friend said, "and I'll set you up with all my single friends."

I smiled and thanked her. Not an offer I'm likely to take up, but she had one thing undeniably right: the need to move, the inevitability now. There is only so long I can afford to stay still, to walk the same streets bound the same places, knowing already the way the hours will pass. As my friend Leo London asks in his saddest song, how long? How far?

In the paintings hung here in the café, made by the climber known for reckless Smith Rock free-soloing, all is somber and rich and receding into darkness. All is the inability of light to illuminate. Figures whose bodies can be seen are all faceless, moving away into the bleak night, while all eyes are colorless and stare off into void; always, faces are pale but also rouged at the cheeks, as if blood has been forced free, all turned inside out. The work is a fearful anatomy of the human condition, as if desire were to be considered as mechanism only, and all energy and life could be reduced to gesture, as if there was only gesture, and the only adequate response is a wistful acceptance of mortality. It is haunting and at times beautiful, but it is also lifeless, rendering all that lives alien and doomed. It is not bad—Adam’s work has after all been lauded in the New Yorker, and he shows all across the nation, making a living at painting, no small success—but the work is not to my taste at all, and when I try to write, the still, sad boxes bearing arrested figures, expiring heat, seem to close about me, oppressive and demanding. I would say they ask for me to enter their world, but perhaps what is worse is that some days I feel I already live there, held wan and cold, moving away into the greater dark.

I should find a new café. You can rearrange the letters in café to spell face. I am looking for a new mirror, a new hope, anew--? Reify, from the latinate root reis, to make anew. If there were beautiful girls to sidle up to at bars who would know the word at all I would lean in, warm breath to the swanline of neck, lips almost touching the fine bones of the ear, and whisper: “Reify me.”

Now what is hotter than that?

Oh, I would not whisper it.

Better to look out the window. I have been here since late morning, drinking coffee and pretending to work. Now the day is gold with sun, the sky not blue but lit almost to white. Orange and brown and yellow leaves are spun in the wind like thronging birds, winging over sidewalk and street in ever-shifting flutter, bright in the richness of the light. The winter chill is a welcome absence. The telephone wires which arc between poles sway a little as if brimming with voices, and surely there is some meaning here, in the bare and interwoven branches of the oak, in the sound of distant laughter and beyond a thrum of engine, steady but receding, and in the passage of a sparrow overhead so quick that it is the blurred ghost of wings already gone and out of sight beyond the high pale buildings on which the stark, thrown shadows of the shifting telephone wires and the branches and leaves move still. The meaning is: be here. The meaning is: beauty can be, will become. The meaning is: forgive even yourself. Be carried and bourne through, not bound by what was; walk in the direction of the sparrow’s flight, into day. Into light.

I sound like an addle-brained poet, nattering on about darkness and light, mortal ends and forgiveness. The meaning is, waste not, want not. The wanting is the human condition, moderately universal. The universal is infinitely indefinite.

Ya-dum-dah-dah. Nonsense and bullshit.

Yesterday I wrote a holiday op-ed and sent it off to the local paper, my once-yearly opining somewhere in the key of hope in spite of all that might make us despair; I covered national and international politics, Tim Tebow and Oregon football, materialism and public education, and for good measure made mention of Langston Hughes and my two young nephews. An incoherent paean to all that is good in all of us, despite all of our doubts. As true as it is, finally, still inadequate to expiate melancholy, or save us from ourselves.

Out of sight in the front of the café, a child’s laughter can be heard. Out the window, the clouds have reclaimed the sky. The paintings close about me, and it is true that my black sweater and burgundy scarf are in the appropriate color palette to take their place on canvas. I have in my pocket a beautiful girl’s number from the bar last night, lottery ticket in the game that is not a game, and in a few hours I meet my friend the NYU economics professor, for dinner. He is practical, and so I won’t mention anything regarding new physics or metaphysics, oppressive art or the self-indulgently bleak landscape of the soul. He will tell me he is dating a model. He will tell me to call the number soon. He will not know that if I did, I would not give my name, and might only say, “Reify me, darling,” before hanging up.

A Glass Raised to Christopher Hitchens

It is cold and damp here, last night freezing fog, whited air and a feeling of stillness about the town even on a Friday night. An uncelebratory end of week, people hurrying to the downtown bars with their heads down, dutiful, headed toward expected inebriation but secretly already huddling beneath blankets in bed. I was similarly uncommitted-- a few hours out with a bunch of writers at a bar I never frequent, a couple games of bar pool back in the familiar digs downtown, no real competition, shots taken casually, no need for concentration and so no moment when the game itself began to come to me in a way that exceeded my own talent. Nothing to play for. And finally the blur of late-night television and my own warm bed.

Out with the writers last night, who are all imminently bound to their actual homes and families, all transplants who came here for the MFA and are soon enough bound back or elsewhere, we spoke of the smallness and provinciality of the town, its comfort and its embrace of mediocrity. I am not sure that such criticism is fair, though I am often the first to level such charges; this is a college town, but not a bad place to live, beautiful in the summers, comfortable and easy and cheap. That it is a poor place to be thirty-one and single and perhaps a bit more cosmopolitan than most is not the fault of the town, but of the fellow who stayed here too long. If there is too little to sustain a life and you stay, starving slowly of spirit, whose fault is that? I have been waiting for something or someone to save me, but there is nothing from which to be saved. There are choices ahead, and I will need to find a path, or make one.

___


A couple years ago, I saw Christopher Hitchens speak at the Arlene Schnitzer in Portland. I had won a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and they were honoring us before Hitchens read. The Heathman is across the street, and I had fond memories of the place-- years and years before I stayed there with my longtime college girlfriend for a night, and we ate dinner there in the restaurant and then had cocktails at the bar, and though I can remember little except the warmth of liquor and the happiness of the night, our future lives before us and the adultness of a fine restaurant and hotel exciting and easy, free of any intimations of the greater burdens of responsibility and disillusionment that lay ahead. We were in fact rarely happy, trying to maintain a long distance relationship at different colleges, our actual chemistry poor, all that was between us a mutual respect which finally was not enough to last. That night we forgot the struggle for the fineness of luxury and comfort.

And so with an hour to kill before Hitchens, I wandered into the Heathman, which was still nicely appointed, if less grand than in my memory, and sat by myself a table and ordered a scotch well beyond my means and looked about the restaurant and bar for-- well, myself, or who I had been. I was not there, nor could I find any couple like I had been, but I did spot Hitchens in a smart three-piece suit, his tie loosened and a little askew, his voice carrying to me, unresolvable except in the strident tone of conviction and confidence with which he was holding forth in speaking to a woman who leaned toward him, rapt and worshipful of his brilliance or fame or both. He was a little red in the face, and as he spoke, he lifted his glass to drive home his point, nearly sloshing his drink from the delicate glass, and watching him, a little paunchy, his hair gone to salted gray, almost absurd but also unapologetically-- alive?-- there at the bar, punch-drunk and chasing skirt only minutes before he was due to speak to a sold-out hall on what would be his final tour, it seemed to me that there was a lesson to observe, and I watched him there until he finally left fifteen minutes before he was due to perform and then followed him into my front row seats. He spoke, without notes, for an hour and a half, and was delightfully uncompromisingly polemic, and when I left that night, I had changed my mind about him. Hitchens was bully for war, explicitly misogynist, irreligious to the point of prejudice, and also, in the rigor of his rhetoric and the cleverness of his invective, among our most interesting writers. He did not bore, and he did not go softly; there is nothing faint-hearted or simpering in Hitchens. His death this week, from hard living that he never regretted and said he would not take back, is a loss indeed.

I do not write like Christopher Hitchens-- my interest in politics is personal, and as for my artistic aspirations, I do not wish to make arguments. But in the vigor of his pursuit and his embrace of life, Hitchens provides an example one could only-- pray-- to match.

In the coffeeshop today, the furnace is too low and the cold outside too bitter, and so my fingers keep going numb and I blow on them to restore feeling and stare out the window where the day is a study of leafless trees to backlit clouds, no blue evident but here and there whited cracks limn the gray sheet of sky as if all were burning beyond in a dull winter forge, faint of fire and all but heatless. Behind me, a young woman in a faded teal wintercoat and triple-wrapped yellow scarf, blonde hair pulled back with a red bandana, sleeps with her head to the table, her mug of coffee no longer steaming beside her nose; earlier, she was sobbing into her cellphone, raising her voice only once to say, "No, I'm fucking not all right." Now, she is asleep, exhausted with hurt, and while she looks to be deep in the respite of dream, soon enough she will wake again, with still too little, too sad, too much to bear. If the empathy of strangers was not its own burden, I would tell her that this too will pass, but who am I to assert platitudes, knowing nothing of where she has come from or where she is bound?

I know this much: that my fingers are cold and stiff, that the words come haltingly, that there should be more that can be done than to stand in a dim room staring out a window at an empty parking lot lined with leafless trees, the street empty, only a single raven winging overhead and then gone. This morning I woke to a message from a past love I've been unable to let go, calling my choices 'admirable', noting that "few people that can sustain a single-minded pursuit of something that will likely not bring wealth or a traditional notion of success." She sincerely means to compliment, but there is an unconscious edge, too-- how I didn't pursue her with the same dedication, how I let her leave without objection or attempt to follow, and though she doesn't know it, she is more right in her implicit reproach than in lauding the purity of my choices. So I have chased art down a rabbit hole into darkness-- all of us will end up underground. I should have chosen happiness, which there are only so many chances at in this life-- instead, terrified of trying and so losing, I lost more. I know that now, and will not make the same mistake again-- yet there is little comfort in the wisdom of past folly. Instead, there is the long still afternoon, and the melancholy of regret, how it unwinds through memory: how did I turn down a laughing girl who drove her old car too fast on the backcountry roads, stopping only when the engine billowed smoke to add more oil? Who ran, laughing, ahead of me on a snow-locked March trail so as to ambush me with a barrage of snowballs thrown so inaccurately she missed entirely, who jumped from tree to tree crossing a waterfall, exhuberant enough and tough enough not to care when she slipped and put her leg in the icy water to the knee? I spent those hours anticipating her gone instead of appreciating her there, just as I sit now watching the day, infusing the shifting sky with arrest, longing for what I cannot have instead of seizing what might be.

The sad girl has taken her cold coffee and gone, and there is no profit in mourning misery you have made. Time to leave this window for warmer rooms and wider windows, to go out into the day; if my heart is heavy, I know too that there are limits to what can be carried, that finally we must forgive even ourselves. That does not mean we must forget, but we can dream, and hope we wake having become better.

Camera Obscura

The fine journal of literature and photography, "Camera Obscura," which was one of Library Journal's top magazines last year and is distributed nationally by Barnes and Noble, has accepted my story "True Conditions," for its Winter issue due out in January 2012.

It is one thing to be pleased with placing work that I know will go quick, like "Reading the Water," which I placed after only five months-- creative nonfiction is an easier market, and work which is moving and concerns fathers and sons and whitewater kayaking is not a hard sell. "True Conditions," is another matter entirely, though it remains the single piece of fiction that is closest to me. Hard to sell fiction about a composition teacher at a university with an acid tongue who reluctantly and bitterly attends the (troubled) birth of his younger brother's son, and is forced to recognize all he has lost to his own inability to commit to love. Harder still to place such a story in market that demands shocks and explosions and easily explicable outcomes, that rewards rote competence and relative conformity and acceptable oddity (we like narrative like narratives we have seen before, with a 'twist!'). After some fifty rejections over five years, many personal and laudatory and nonetheless reluctant to embrace a story which is finally sad and austere and subtle in its implications, I am glad to place a piece I have always believed in. After so long, I feel less vindication than relief-- at least one orphan found a home in the end, I found myself thinking last week, before chiding myself for imagining stories to be motherless children, wandering the literary world in search of shelter.