I was holding it all in
Monday night I was still housesitting. I turned out on the lights and crawled into bed at ten p.m.; decent hour. The dogs slept next to me, and when the bed started to shake I thought one of them was scratching his ear, but there was no jangle of dogtags, and then suddenly it felt really creepy, as though someone were standing at the end of the bed and shaking the bed back and forth.
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In my continuing efforts to read more writers that I probably should have read by now, I went beyond the class reading assignment and came across the deliciously catty essay by Gore Vidal on Tennessee Williams, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self”. Essentially a piece on the contrasting memoirs famous people write about each other, it contained such passages as this:
“Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues. By the time he was an adolescent he had his themes. I am not aware that any new information (or feeling?) has got through to him in the twenty-eight years since our Roman spring. In consequence, we have drifted apart. ‘Gore no longer receives me’, said the Bird to one of his innumerable interviewers; and he put this down to my allegedly glamorous social life. But the reason for the drifting apart is nothing more than difference of temperament. I am a compulsive learner of new things while the Bird’s occasional and sporadic responses to the world outside the proscenium arch have not been fortunate. Castro was, after all, a gentleman,’ he announced after an amiable meeting with the dictator. Tell that to the proscribed fags of Cuba.”
And my favorite:
“In the ‘Memoirs’ Tennessee tells us a great deal about his sex life, which is one way of saying nothing about oneself.”
I have decided that it is in my interest to be as bitchy as possible to guarantee for myself a bright career in writing. After all, nobody wants to read about heartfelt life experiences (well, Oprah used to, but witness the case involving Jonathan Franzen). Rather it would seem that an acerbic wit and a gossipy “voice”, gilded by lyricism, is what gets you into the Establishment.
This is what NOT gets you invited: sitting in the car for an extra three minutes after parking because “Piano in the Dark” is playing on the radio. Brenda Russell, anyone?
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Yes, I like Hella Good.
Yes, I already adore 18, even more than Play.
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So, like, God. Tell me what to do with these angry days of mine. It’s like having hot flashes. Is 31 too young for male menopause? A rush of hot steely wind that I set my chin against and squint. I’m on the outside looking in again. A room of alcoholics laugh together and damnit I’m not gonna laugh. I sit in the back, I cross my arms, I glare at the floor. My life does not feel like mine own. I’m over here, it’s all over there. One thousand steps to take, and I’d rather just sleep.
Hello?
Are you there, God? It’s me, dogpoet.
(We must, we must, we must increase our bust!)
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“When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off the DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”
-Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
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Is grief, then, like a depth charge? Igniting below the surface, rolling outwards from the center, pushing up at farther places, exploding outward? I find I want to bury my face in another man’s chest and disappear for awhile, as if I could hide, as if I could be saved.
Crazy then, this preoccupation with unrequited emotion. Movies where they stare and linger and want. A self-defeating gesture. What good is unrequited love? No one pins a medal on the loveless lover. Here, you’ve suffered enough. Fuck, no. Nobody watches you; nobody rewards you. It’s up to you alone. Fuck unrequited. Who needs that?
