With the advent of mobile phones and social media, we’ve
learned to externalise so many of our memories;
Instagram and Facebook, and the omnipresence of cameras within our
phones have granted us an expansion of our very minds; these devices have
become, in and off themselves, sense organs, and archives.
Having grown up in the 80s, there are precious few pictures
of my teen years. My parents were far from fond of my aesthetic choices, and I
never had enough pocket money to invest in the taking of pictures, or
development of film.
My inner images of myself from that time are all that
survive, and they all have wavy edges, prone to the kindness of idealism, or
the cruelty of internalised judgements from others. There is one picture that does exist, one taken
with a phone some 15 years ago of a TV screen, whereon was playing a VHS
tape: I’d been filmed one day for the
news, because home Karaoke had just been invented: I was in the 163rd
St Mall, and a local news station was doing a light hearted segment on people’s
reactions to the device which would allow anyone to “feel like a star in their
own living room”. I sang “Singin’ in the Rain”, because that’s the song Alex
and his droogs sang in “Clockwork Orange”. Punk rock man.
Anyhow, the picture is of a 17 year old me: I’m smiling, and
looking down. There’s a microphone cupped in both my hands, and my curly mohawk
has fallen over my eyes. I look
particularly gentle, I think. Soft. Vulnerable. Contrary to the image I strove to project, of
an angry, toughened, punk rock psychopath who’d shoplift earrings from the
Woolworth’s, and stab them through my ear on a whim; I wanted desperately to be
seen as someone not to be messed with, because at the time, I was someone
everyone messed with. I was a veritable
punching bag for every bully at my school, including teachers and faculty who’d
never outgrown such tendencies.
Sometimes I wonder what it might be like if I were able to
travel back in time to those days, to observe myself in that context; perhaps
even more revealingly, to observe those who took delight in tormenting and
bullying me; I wonder what I might see in them. Their bullying was brutish,
never sophisticated. I wonder what I
might be able to perceive in their faces; what might their microexpressions
reveal? Was there really such hate? Was
there fear? Was there helplessness and angst desperate for an outlet, any
outlet?
Was there guilt?
I reach back with my mind, but those images are even fuzzier
than those of my own face. In fact, if pressed, I doubt I could even name a
single one of my tormentors: not the jocks who called me “faggot” as they beat
and kicked me while I lay in a fetal position on the floor, trying to protect
my face, not the vice principal who then brought me into his office, pulled
down my pants, bent me over his desk and paddled me for “fighting”.
I remember the small revolver revealed threateningly to me
one day out on the front steps by the metalhead kid who often threw raw eggs at
me, but I don’t recall his face or name. Like some perverse version of Proust’s
tea soaked madeleines however, the image
of any similar gun on the news brings that moment back to me in the kind of
clarity only one fearing for her survival might experience: his face, blotted out, but the gun, an image as clear as my mental
image of the phone on which I’m now typing this memoir.
.....
On the morning of my eighteenth birthday, my mom bade me to drop out. She and my dad
had been called into the office enough times to witness the way the students
behaved, and, more concerning for my mom, the way the faculty and staff spoke
to the students. She saw the inherent violence on it all.
.....
I found the picture I’d described in my Instagram, and it’s somewhat different: rather than
looking down, my face is slightly downturned, but my eyes are looking up, and
my smile looks almost... menacing?
This is the fallibility of memory. Perhaps in my previous description, I was
Describing how I might have seen myself at the time, were I
granted the time travel opportunity I described above.
Then again, maybe the shot I’d captured was a split second
after I’d been looking down, smiling sheepishly. It’s possible. I can envision the two expressions, and they
flow together organically.
.....
Sometimes, in the midst of that strange, dreamless sleep
between dreams, an image of some random object that was a fixture in my
parents’ house pops into focus, and my body jerks violently awake, short of
breath, heart pounding.
All gone.
The enormous “I’ll Drink To Anything” mug that held two
regular mugs worth of coffee, the green, oval cigar tin from the middle section
of the downstairs medicine cabinet, the enormous, wooden headboard in my
parents’ bedroom that made a specific sound I’ve never heard replicated each
time it banged against the wall whenever someone sat on the bed...
Gone.
All this familiar ephemera–
Elements of a world I once knew with my skin: mundane things
affixed in time, place, soul...
The world I find myself in now can only be characterised by
the absence of familiarity; I reach out in all directions, trying to snatch
“home” elements from the ether.
They cost so much, and none of them are the same.
.....
I burrow deeply into nostalgia, like a worm, grasping at
objects that lie along the way: that chrome, “snowcap” bottle-cap pin I wore
daily in the eighth grade, the two- tone blue Vans I wore until they had holes,
and my parents begged my therapist to convince me to throw them away, the khaki
safari fedora from Merry-Go-Round that I was so proud of...
And of all things, it’s now an image of the roughly woven,
off white, textile curtains that hang in what was my father’s office, (which
used to be the family room) in the Miami house that now pervades my thoughts;
this specific, and unimportant thing, that witnessed the daily, evening family ritual
in the early 80s, when we’d gather after dinner on the roughly upholstered
couch to watch that day’s episode of Guiding Light on the VCR, that- once
turned from family recreation space into my father’s office, hung silently behind my mother’s back on
those sleepless nights she’d play Freecell at my father’s computer while softly
listening to Schubert’s “Trout” on CD; that witnessed my father’s endless
frustrations, cursing over computer, after computer, after computer down the
years that he could never manage to wrangle to his will..
Those curtains, like the details of the corners of the
produce section at the Winn Dixe across the street, that I used to visualise like
a meditation on hot, lonely nights when I couldn’t sleep seven thousand miles
away in Kfar Habad...
Artifacts are witnesses.
When all is threateningly unfamiliar, it seems to be things
that are specific and trivial, even mundane that offer a feeling of safe
familiarity. Maybe this is the lure of
nostalgia; we’ve already survived this past; the only thing the future
promises, is that at some point, we won’t.
.....
The house, and all that it contained is gone. I’ve been paid
off.
What a weird chapter.
I feel like a character torn from the pages of a book that’s been my
entire universe since the day I was written, and now...
Now that every copy has been thrown on the fire; I’m adrift
in empty space, bereft of plot, setting, history. A mirror reflecting nothing.
.....
The other day, a friend posted on Facebook, asking about
people’s first apartment; mine was in South Gate, Los Angeles.
It was 1988, and for 120.00/week, I got to sleep in a roach infested
one story row motel, next door to Samsam’s Liquor, where the bathroom window
wouldn’t close completely, and I had to sleep in socks, sweatpants and a hoodie
with the hood pulled tight around my head and a bandana tied over my face to
keep the roaches from crawling into my ears, mouth or nose. I lived on Night
Train from Samsam’s and quesadillas from the burrito truck and I thought life
was amazing, because I’d escaped the hell of suburban Unincorporated Dade
County, Florida.
I’ve lived in several crappy apartments.
There was the motel in Key West, where my friend Meredith fell through the
rotting, wooden floor one morning on her way back to bed from the
bathroom. It was another motel, and we
shared not only a single room, but a single bed as well, although I ended up
sleeping on the beach most nights whenever she had a trick.
There was the “closet” on Dor Dor veDorshav Street in
Jerusalem, that was about 2 sq metres, and then there was the place in East
Harlem, on the third floor of an old walk up,
where the stairs had a literal depression in the middle from a hundred
years of foot traffic; it was over a 24 hr car wash, and I had 6 roommates (2
of us per room). The Brasilian landlady
kept a fermented crab in a bottle on top of the fridge, and I later
learned, she’d routinely go through my things while I was at work.
This place, the one that Carrie and I shared for 18 years,
is the nicest place I’ve ever lived; it’s the first place that’s really felt
like “home”, albeit less so in my love’s absence.
And things are changing here. Last night, I broke a small
ceramic plate. It slid out of the
cabinet and bounced off the stone countertop.
Until it exploded on the floor, I’d maintained a vain hope it might
survive. It was one of two survivors of
a set that’s lost members over the years in various ways. The two had nested comfortably atop the pile
of pasta bowls on the lower shelf of the cabinet for years. Now there’s only
one.
.....
When, in 1987 Sinéad
O’Connor’s album “The Lion and The Cobra” came out, I was instantly obsessed.
She was everything I wanted to be: powerful, beautiful, vulnerable, so
unflinchingly herself.
I was an awkward, traumatised, bullied, 18 year old punk in my
father's black combat boots, and a grossly oversized, loud, polyester old man’s
suit I’d bought at “Red, White and Blue Thrift” on 6th. I was also
seen by most people as a boy, although even the gargantuan suit in which I hid
fit far better than that designation.
I was sensitive, suicidal, friendless, and the favourite
target of every bully in North Miami Beach.
I was also carless, and so, daily I’d take the 9 Downtown
bus to the 163rd St Mall, to break out of my suburban isolation, to
see people and be seen.
A favorite way to pass my travel time was to fantasise
conversations with Sinéad. I just knew
that if somewhere along the bus route she happened to board, being the
outlandish, punk rock beacon I was, she’d see me, with my shaved head and many
piercings, and surrounded by the conservative nightmare of 1980s Miami, we’d
become instant friends.
And so in my imagination, she’d get on at the stop after
mine, by the 7-11. At first, we’d talk shyly to one another: she’d tell me she
was in town visiting family. She’d ask
me if I had an extra cigarette, and what there was to do. I’d suggest we walk
down to “Open Books and Records”, or go Thrift Store hopping; there really
weren’t many options. She was 3 days
short of 2 years my senior, but it didn’t matter; we were of the same tribe,
and I loved her fiercely. I wanted her to become my older sister, my protector,
and I wanted to protect her. I imagined her standing fearlessly between me and
my bullies, and I imagined quiet moments of emotional intimacy. I think many
big loves of all kinds might be born this way.
.....
I’m tempted to check on my ticket
To hold it in my hands
Take stock of my inventory.
But a body in motion tends to stay in motion
Unless acted upon by an equal
And opposite force
Something I'm severely
Lacking at the moment.
“She’s got a ticket to ride
She’s got a ticket to riii-hiii-hiiide
She’s got a ticket to ride..”
But alas
She still cares.
Resistance takes up so much space, and all of my
energy. I’m constantly worried I’ll run
out, and of course, the inner dialogue is constant:
“Why are you bothering? What do you think could possibly
change?”
“I don’t know, but I’m afraid I’d end up leaving the party
right before it gets good. “
“But you’re tired. You’re so tired. And everything hurts.
And the bills are mounting, and the city is starting congestion pricing. You
won’t be able to afford to even leave your neighbourhood anymore, you’re going
to be more isolated than ever, and what will you do when your funds run out?”
“I don’t know.
I don’t know.”
I finish my coffee, and return to bed.
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