Memoir (this is a work in progress.)

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 163^rd 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 6^th. 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 163^rd 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.