tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-204406172024-03-13T07:58:46.481-07:00Grace UndressedProfessionally ShamelessGracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.comBlogger192125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-14150834982706089452016-12-17T01:36:00.000-08:002016-12-18T12:57:44.375-08:00like fog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Even with all the ice and the midday sun skimming low on the horizon, this winter is easier than the first, and I think every winter will be. The first winter was all howling loneliness, always dark and I could never sleep. <br />
<br />
I remember the mornings, sitting up out of bed with crusty eyes, making coffee, and catching the bus up the valley to go to work. Frozen,white fog pressed flat against the windows, blocking out everything and then the bus pops out into a patch of clear and you can see how clouds are hanging on the mountain and the road is going up and down and in and out of them. We are driving in the sky, and the sun comes up out of the cloud bank dripping like a bucket from a well.<br />
<br />
My memories run constantly, some over and over on repeat, others flashing like unsuspected fish up from the muddy bottom. Sometimes the memory has a beginning and a middle, or at least and end, but most of the time it's white noise like this --<br />
<br />
I remember the first night of the trip out here, and the name of the town where that first motel was: Big Springs. A flat spot on the plains, where I've never been before or since. What comes back to me is the sound of the trucks going by on the highway so close and so fast that in my mind each one shakes the room like a gale-force wind. Now I see I must have been afraid, but I didn't know it then. The first winter proved me right on a few essential things.<br />
<br />
Because I was right when I thought it would be easy to start over, leaving everything, emptying. It is easy, so easy. You don't even have to change your name because it means nothing now to anyone you meet. You are a blank, but you can't stay that way because nature abhors a vacuum. Things will come along to fill you, maybe remake you, maybe make you forget too much. You'll be forgotten, too, in the place you left behind, memories of you will dry up like puddles. How is it possible to live in a place so long and leave behind so little of consequence? Living light, you called it. You said you liked it that way.<br />
<br />
You never have to tell a single lie, because no one has any questions about you. Every morning I get on the bus and smile at the driver, and he smiles at me. I go to work, and to the store, and home, and in no place does my body feel solid or real. Maybe it's all the layers you wear, how they numb you. Or maybe it's the memories, how they light up your sensory cortices, flotsam and jetsam of the past blocking out the present. My startle reflexes are tuned up so high I feel every time someone whose learned my name says it out loud. I don't leave my house too much that year. Also, I haven't yet learned to walk in the cold.<br />
<br />
That first winter taught me other things, too -- another way to move through time, a way to live when it is almost always dark and you can almost never sleep. Time moves in a spiral then, bringing you back to same place over and over, only little higher up. I blame the pace of travel. If I told you that it took a week of driving, barely stopping to sleep a few hours each night, eating at gas stations, it might wound to you like a long time, but it was blazing fast, moving like a comet across the incredible stretches of the west, over mountains that are still formidable with all the horsepower you can pack under a hood.<br />
<br />
To the body moving that fast is jarring, dizzying. It will take most of a year for the buzzing in my head to stop, a white noise made up of sudden feelings and pooling memories of motel rooms, all the ones from the trip and then others, all the motel rooms of my life and there have been a lot. That winter teaches me some things about moving too far too fast.<br />
<br />
So much darkness not to sleep in. Odd dreams when I sleep, quick waking that leaves me uneasy. I start to believe that people are looking at me everywhere I go, and what's worse is that this isn't true. I have a feeling like someone wants to hurt me.<br />
<br />
I've felt this way before. It makes me hold my body differently, tense when I go around a corner or through a door. One time, after another move, another start-over, this feeling built and built until I had a panic attack one hot afternoon in May, a bad one. I remember leaning over the kitchen sink, a sudden pain in my stomach, falling into it, then nothing. My neighbor heard me screaming and found me in my kitchen on the floor, thrashing, and called the ambulance. He's standing over me with his phone in his hand and I wonder what this means and who he is.<br />
<br />
I didn't want to go to the hospital, begged not to go, but I couldn't answer questions for the paramedics, didn't know what day it was or my name. Memories all blanked out, white like fog on the windows of the bus, empty as a dreamer, but awake.<br />
<br />
Ambulance, hospital, hallway, bed. Scared of the nurses, like a child -- will they put a needle in me? Old lines of thought that run like this: no one will help you, no one wants to help you, only you can help you and how will you help you when you don't know your name? They take your clothes.<br />
<br />
The doctor come with his chart and his questions. From outside, where I watch myself, I know that if I could explain he would understand and he would let me go. Inside, where I am still panicking, his questions open up the holes I am afraid of falling into, so instead I get angry and I tell him nothing is wrong. From outside, I beg myself to calm down. From inside, I can't.<br />
<br />
He leaves. Inside, I'm glad because you can't trust anyone, they are the ones who put you here to begin with. Outside, I'm horrified because he was the one who maybe could have helped. From this perspective, which seems to see through space and time, I watch myself penetrating further and further in, other hospitals, doors slamming shut behind me.<br />
<br />
When my name comes back to me a few hours later it is sudden, the way the sky up here can clear with no warning and turn brilliant and innocent. A nurse comes in, an older woman with her hair drawn back tight and her face carefully arranged to meet me. I'm OK now, I want to tell her, I won't say anything else to scare you. I ask her to bring the doctor.<br />
<br />
It takes a long time, but I don't mind. If you've ever forgotten your name and remembered it again, you know it is the best feeling in the world. I tell the doctor "panic attacks" and I answer all the questions he asks. I can tell there are more questions, and he says he wants to keep me under observation, but by now I remember that I'm an adult and I can refuse, so I do. Finally, he shrugs.<br />
<br />
This is a small ER in a county hospital and it is the weekend. He knows how much paperwork it takes to commit someone involuntarily, and I'd be out again immediately. My eyes are so clear now, my affect so regulated and congruent. I apologize for all the trouble. He makes me sign and form that says I am being released against medical advice, and suggests I consider wearing a medical alert bracelet for my condition. To keep things nice I say that I'll consider it. The nurse brings back my clothes. I let the hospital gown fall down my arms and off my body. On the way out I stop in the lobby and buy candy from the vending machine. It takes an hour to walk home.<br />
<br />
This is a story I don't tell new people, and of course no one ever asks you -- have you ever lost your mind for a while? Do you know how good it feels when they let you out? Ever walked home in the sunset, trying to make your thoughts weave back together and cover up the blank spots in your timeline? <i>My stomach hurt, I bent over the sink, then I was gone -</i>-<br />
<br />
Because I could give it a name, that's why they let me out. Because I gave it a name and made it make sense. Names have this power. They take the terrible and unknowable and symbolize it, translate it into the realm of the rational and classifiable. Of course, the name is also nothing. It explains nothing. It doesn't tell you what it feels like for me unless you've felt it too, and it doesn't tell me why it came or how to make it go.<br />
<br />
Yet somehow, once you know the name you may find that you release some of these questions. The name brings with it its ontological framework, the grace of which is that what doesn't fit loses its significance, becomes ghost.<br />
<br />
As long as you act quite ordinary -- wait for the bus in the morning and go to work, smile at the people that you meet and introduce yourself, answer when your name is spoken -- then people will grant you the privilege of very few questions.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I feel lucky, and other times it makes me too afraid to cry and I feel like I've lost everything until I depart the bus at the downtown station in the cloud-filtered early morning light and see the old men and their dogs, the ones who sleep here all night and know what it's like to be really cold.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-89908898525146406282016-11-19T14:56:00.000-08:002016-11-19T14:56:00.384-08:00a letter to a guy I met at the library<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm so glad we're friends on Facebook. I like knowing you. I wish we'd gotten to know each other better in real life before I moved. Maybe we could have been real-life friends, too. I appreciated all the attention you gave me at the library, all the big smiles and doe-eyed looks. I was working really hard in school, and sometimes your smiles were my only break. I'm glad we went for drinks those times. You made it really obvious that you were trying to hook up with me, but that you were also trying to hook up with everybody, so it was casual, no big deal. I wasn't trying to hook up with anybody at that time, but if I had been you would have been at the top of the list. It's funny we didn't get to be better friends, though. We just never quite made it past a certain superficial barrier, and I really wanted to, because whatever was on the other side of that barrier, I have a feeling, was probably pretty cool.<br />
<br />
I try to think about how your experience of being an incredibly good-looking guy of color might have played into that situation. You were probably used to being exoticized and fetishized by white girls you met at the library. You pretty much said as much, and you implied that this was fine, because you liked getting laid. This was pretty much as far as we got.<br />
<br />
I was older than you. I wanted to be respectful, careful. I didn't want to fetishize you or exoticize you because I wasn't really sure if it was as OK with you as you said, or if it would always be as OK with you as you said it was then. When I was 22, I submitted myself to a lot objectification that I must have believed at the time was inevitable, that I thought, in my insouciance, I might as well make bank on, since it was already there. I do not feel now all the ways that I did then. I question how the discourses of oppression persuaded me I could embrace what were presented as the rewards without being harmed, without harming others.<br />
<br />
Not that you were not beautiful. Not that part of what was fun about going for drinks with you after six hours studying for qualifiers was not about the shine on your mahogany skin, your thick, black eyelashes, your long, strong fingers. Not that race was not absolutely there, between us at the bar, grazing against us always like our knuckles grazed when we reached for our glasses at the same time.<br />
<br />
I didn't think this letter would be so much about race, but it feels unavoidable after the kind of election we've just had. I voted blue after watching a Youtube video of a young white guy talking about his Nazi ideals. I've been depressed ever since. I wonder if you voted and what you think about all this. You never gave me the impression you were particularly political, but we never got that deep about things like that, which is funny because I like getting deep about things like that, and you were a history major. I wouldn't have like to hear what you would say. I think that sex, and race, and my fear, my desire to be respectful, as well as whatever was going on inside of you about all the white girls you met at the library, it all got in the way. I wonder why it was now that you got in touch, years after our last last-call together, our last high-five and side-hug before weaving our separate ways home, your message: <i>You moved? How am I supposed to run into you now?</i><br />
<br />
I haven't been onto Facebook since the election, couldn't face all the vomit of feelings the come up with the re-posts about Muslim registry, hate crimes, quotes from Elie Wiesel, my own sick sense of impotence. I beg myself not to think: <i>Nobody, nothing can arrest this. Everything that was supposed to get better is getting worse. Shame. Rage. In what ways have I participated? I want nothing more than to be innocent and that is something none of us can be.</i><br />
<br />
While we're on the subject of race, can I tell the story about the last time I was close with a black guy? It was in sixth grade. I know, a long time ago. I've had good friends who were Latino, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, but in between sixth grade and now, none of them have been black guys. I don't know why. Probably has something to do with growing up in a crappy ass part of the rural south, a town left behind in time thirty years ago, with nothing to sell itself but it's long, low rows of chicken houses stinking up the summer breeze. Those shitty houses where only the poorest of the poor would work, the migrant families and the black people who lived, not even in a shitty part of town but in a whole other town, Jonesboro, a town outside of the town, where there was no water, no sidewalks, no nothing but a few rows of shanty houses, trailers, an old horse, an old dog, the ever-living moss hanging from its strangled perch on the trees.<br />
<br />
Erik Washington, my last black guy friend, lived there. I lived even further out of town, down the most dirt of dirt roads, so the bus picked me up the very last, even after Erik and the other Jonesboro kids. I got in the mornings, clueless and forlorn in my cousin's hand-me-downs, out of date and never the right size, my hair cut never-quite-straight by mom sitting on the landing upstairs under the bare bulb where the light was brightest. Town kids clucked and mooed at me while I walked down the aisle and no one moved over to give me a seat until the bus driver stopped the bus and yelled back without turning around.<br />
<br />
I knew Erik from 4-H, where we both showed calves. Maybe they mooed at him to when he got on, although I wouldn't know because that was before my stop. I don't think so, though, because Erik was kind of popular. He was older than me and played football. He had a nice smile and a goofy, friendly sense of humor. We talked sometimes, I don't remember what about. I do remember a mom of somebody, a white lady, come over while we drinking punch together at a 4-H meet and acting like we were doing something wrong. I remember not understanding this, forgetting it, then remembering it again. If Erik was sitting by himself on the bus, he would move over. He was one of only two or three people who would do it without getting yelled at by the driver. I remember the sweet relief on those mornings, when I knew I would at least get to school OK. If I had to sit next to someone who did not want to sit next to me, that was the beginning of a bad day.<br />
<br />
The white girls from town were mean with their words: Hey, look. It's the real-life garbage-patch kid. the black girls were mean with their eyes. I don't know why they were mad at me, except that I was garbage, worse than garbage, and yet still, inexplicably, white with all and whatever of what that meant. It was the white boys that were scariest, though. It didn't matter if they were from town or not, they looked at me with a kind of viscous appetite, like hurting me was the start of something that made them hungrier as it went. Scariest, because when it started like that in the morning it would usually go on all day -- the snarled comments at my locker, the foot stuck out to trip me in the hall. My stink of fear and submission --<i>please don't hurt me, please don't look at me</i> -- around me all day like a fog. The bus home on those days, those were the worst times. That was when there was holding down, pinching, the whispers, the words that didn't even make sense to me, things I didn't understand and I didn't even ask myself why me, because I was nothing and anything could happen to me, because everyone saw what happened and nobody cared.<br />
<br />
Just Erik. Erik was the one, the only one who spoke for me. Erik told his mom. Erik's mom turned out to be a sober lady of the church. She knew right from wrong. She came to our house, I remember this. I remember opening the door to someone I had never met. I remember her sitting at the table with my mother. I am sent out of the room for their conversation, but I hover half-way up the stairs and listen to her voice cutting through the haze and silence of our house: <i>What's happening to your child is not right. What's happening is not right. We have to come together.</i> Something moves in my chest, unfurling, not large but solid, unmistakeable and with heat. It hits against what's real, and though it comes with pain its name is also hope. <br />
<br />
I want my mother to be like Erik's mother. I want her voice to get angry and strong and sure. What Erik's mom doesn't know is, my mother is not the coming-together kind. Not that she doesn't want to, but she doesn't know how. She only knows how to close her eyes and wish my pain would go away, like she wishes away her own. She never talks to me about this conversation, and so I only know what I learned from the stairs, but that turns out to be a lot. What is happening to me is not alright. It is not alright, but it is happening. Like the chicken-houses are not alright. Like the Nicaraguan girl whose parents work there, who sits next to me in class but cannot learn because she does not speak English and because she needs glasses and cannot see the board, like that is not alright. Like it is not alright that there is a place like Jonesboro, where people like Erik and his mother, who are angry and strong and sure and know that it is not alright, must still live anyway. It is not our choice. The things that are happening to us are not our choice and that is not alright.<br />
<br />
Nothing changes on the bus after this. My mother turns her mind to something else while that thing that is warm and solid in my chest folds up again, and I never see Erik's mom again. Erik and I never talk about this, although he will still let me next to him the few times that seat is empty. But Erik still saved me.<br />
<br />
Today, I wish I had another story where I am the hero and save Erik, where I stand up for him to a crowd of kids, where I raise my voice and shout them into silence. Back then, I never even thought of this. I never imagined myself with any power I turn to anyone's effect: garbage girl. Even a decade after, long after I thought it put this off, it wasn't off. It took so much work, so many violent convulsions of spirit. I did some things in the course of that, things I wouldn't do now.<br />
<br />
Maybe you have, too. Back to you. I'm going to guess that you've been angry, too, and sure and strong sometimes, your soul has bucked with a surge of strength and hit with pain against the limits of our situation. Maybe fallen back at times, maybe accepted oppression as inevitable, resigned to make the most of it, to get laid as much as possible. I remember you talked up growing up in Washington - <i>so white there I thought I had a skin disease</i>. Maybe one day looked in the mirror and seen your high cheekbones, your long eyelashes, thought about the hunger certain people have when they look at you and decided there is a way to feel good about this, to use it. Maybe I didn't want to be part of this, and didn't know how to find my way out either. Maybe this is why we were only friends, and why we're still friends. Maybe I'm over-thinking everything.<br />
<br />
Anyway, this was my baggage when we were sitting at the bar talking about nothing, with sex keeping everything safe, intentional, and on the surface. I don't know what your baggage was. We never got there. I'd be curious to know.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-4990035519430019612016-01-17T15:07:00.000-08:002016-01-24T11:30:45.476-08:00signs of life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Thank you to those of you who still come here from time to time looking for me. I miss you, too. The last few years have been a lot of work and I didn't do any writing for pleasure for a long time. I didn't tell any stories. Lately it feels like whatever it is that makes me want to do that has been waking up again, maybe because life has a certain amount of predictability in it now within which it is comforting to remember stranger times.<br />
<br />
For a while I really did want to wipe it all clean and start over, and I have found that this is disconcertingly easy to do, despite everything that's been revealed to us about the illusory nature of our privacy. Those of us who came of age in the sheltered garden of history between the Cold War and the War on Terror were encouraged to regard the digitization of our lives as a wide-open frontier of anonymity, ours for the taking, another iteration of our manifest destiny. We believed in free speech and the ripe possibilities of interconnection: tune in, log on, upload. How lightly we held the knowledge -- never hidden from us, only disguised as history -- that, like every frontier, this was a military project all along.<br />
<br />
We wake up now as in a cold dawn, understanding with the gut-punch of the should-have-been obvious how easy it is to signal a cascade if processes, at first most likely automated, but perhaps slowly gathering an audience, triggering additional layers surveillance and collection: [caller, recipient, time of call, duration, location], camera in laptop flicking on, in-phone GPS cricket-calling into the cross-hairs. Data generating data to be reviewed, shared, commented on, analyzed by other frail humans with hearts full of ordinary brokenness and desire.<br />
<br />
And yet despite all this, for me it's been easy to disappear in one place and appear in another by wholly ordinary means, and to begin a life as a contributing member of society, living a life that makes sense to other people so that they feel no need to ask more than the dinner-party kinds of questions. With all that it's possible to know, about me or anyone else, most people one encounters are not very curious.<br />
<br />
Lots of people must have this same experience, although not everyone takes their living of a double life so literally as to create other names, other histories. Not everyone has to re-learn to introduce themselves by the name on their birth certificate. I have a tendency to take things pretty far. But many of us must be in some way doing this all the time, trying on and then shedding identities with and without an intention or a purpose, going new places and shaking hands with strangers like nothing ever happened, piecing together the rules for fitting in, curating a collection of stories that will and won't be told.<br />
<br />
I'm not going to cop right now to anything as sad or self-eulogizing as saying that I have regrets about the new life or the old one. I've always fought against that streak of self pity in myself. My life is ordinary in the best of ways. When I wake up in the morning, I have an idea of what to expect, and to enjoy that is to enjoy a privilege. And still I am unable to forget all that I've had a chance to learn about the darkened rooms and the things that go on there, the splendid variety of ways the human soul (if you'll forgive me that word, in context) presents itself to another when it believes no one is looking on.<br />
<br />
I have to try, like all of us do, to protect myself. I ought to keep to myself anything that might constitute identifying data: names, dates, locations. I supposed it might be wiser in cases to describe events parallel to history rather than overlying it. To lie, in other words. It would keep me safer. And then on the other hand again, I suspect the frisson of danger might just be what some people always liked most about me anyway: the idea that, if they wanted to enough, they could hurt me. </div>
Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-20605415452637439152015-01-17T14:45:00.000-08:002015-02-01T15:36:41.146-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
lost at sea<br />
without words<br />
only wave after wave<br />
like blank lines<br />
i can only name the color: gray<br />
<br />
somewhere the wind is sweeping<br />
long strands of hair across my face<br />
<br />
tell me<br />
<br />
there is nothing to tell you<br />
<br />
if i lie still enough i think i can keep<br />
my balance a little longer<br />
how many people have told me,<br />
i always thought by now i'd be dead<br />
it turns out it takes more than that<br />
<br />
no answers<br />
for people i used to know<br />
on the behalf of ghosts<br />
ghosts have their own answers<br />
i have silence<br />
and sometimes<br />
a sentence or two that comes from nowhere<br />
like these:<br />
<br />
Watch the horizon<br />
and don't grip too hard<br />
to the wet wood; salt and slime<br />
under your fingers<br />
will betray you. Trying to survive<br />
is dangerous</div>
Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-21683804742008039962011-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:002011-07-16T13:01:36.016-07:00Carrying boxes across the yard; sweat crawling into my eyes. I always seem to end up moving in the summer. Just a few more rounds of sweeping and sorting and throwing away. <br /><br />I put aside some things I think the little girls next door might like: an empty china salt-cellar shaped like a dancing pig, a small stuffed donkey, a rubber frog, a lizard carved out of wood. Things just pile up on you if you live in a place too long, things you never wanted. Things people give you, or leave with you, things you just find somewhere and hang onto for no reason. <br /><br />I take the little box of things across the yard to the neighbors' house and knock on the door. Mary waves me in from the kitchen. The girls are falling all over the floor in their little flowered dresses and I sit down with my back against the cabinets to show them what I brought. I give Sophie, the oldest, the china pig. She holds it against her chest and then runs off. Penny and I play with the rubber frog. <br /><br />"We can't believe you're leaving," Mary says. "I don't think the girls even know what that means. You've been here their whole lives."<br /><br />"Sophie wasn't even born yet. I remember you out in the yard, pregnant as the day is long."<br /><br />"I was up on my porch drinking red wine and thinking, do I really want to have a kid?"<br /><br />Mary's hair is long and dark, with lovely lines of gray. She was 43 when Sophie was born and had lived a rich life. I like to think of this. When I was living on my own in the leaky west side of the house I used to watch their lit windows at night, catching glimpses of the children's round, smooth heads at the dinner table, what seemed to me like the perfect rhythm of life contained and safe. <br /><br />Sophie comes back in the kitchen with a small stuffed cat. "This is for you," she says. "This is your goodbye present."<br /><br />I hold the bubble of a laugh in my throat. A gift for me when I am getting rid of things -- please god, no more things to remind me of people I won't see again -- but of course I take it. I say thank you, and the bubble of laughing turns into crying. I knew it would. <br /><br />Mary sees my face knot up. "Look girls," she says. "Our neighbor is leaving." She sits down on the floor next to me. Penny crawls into my lap. <br /><br />When we moved off the farm when I was twelve I felt like this, like I'd never really loved anything or anyone enough. There are the people you say goodbye to and the people who you never say goodbye to, who were part of your life and never even knew it. <br /><br />"You're going good places," Mary says. "I'm almost jealous in a way. I've been watching you pack, thinking about the last time I packed up and left a place. It's great to see people move on when they're moving on to something good."<br /><br />I think so, too, and I'm not unhappy, just sad. <br /><br />So goodbye, people I never knew, you intimate, reoccurring strangers. We went to the same bars and the same coffee houses and the same shows, we rode the bus together and watched each other get older, never speaking. You cut your hair and you look like a lawyer now, and you, you still walk around with your hands in your pockets, getting wilder and wilder. <br /><br />Goodbye to things that never happened. Goodbye, nostalgia for a perfect future imagined in the past. Sometimes I still catch a whiff of you, unplaceable and unmistakable, like a perfume bringing back the skin of someone whose face you don't remember. <br /><br />Goodbye, mistakes I never fixed, quarrels I never righted, opportunities I never exploited, places I never went. Some failure is to be expected. <br /><br />I don't stay too long. You can't sit on the floor in someone else's kitchen and cry too long, and besides there's the last rounds of packing left to do. I stand up and lift the girls up in the air one at a time and hug and kiss them and say goodbye forever to the idea that they are somehow mine, my secret, imaginary daughters. I say goodbye to their first days of schools and their first loves and everything of theirs I'll never know about. <br /><br />I know that when the last boxes are in the truck and the door is locked for the last time with the key left underneath the mat, I know the road will wind out as smooth as thread off a spool and the crest of every hill will open up the sky into endless horizons. It's time, anyway. It's been too long since I left everything behind. Which you can never do, of course, but you can try.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-66489532448861499442011-06-09T22:01:00.000-07:002011-06-10T16:26:25.264-07:00dreamMy lover is the owner of a huge hotel, but it is more like a fortress, full of tracking devices and booby traps. I admire how perfectly he controls his environment, how imperviously he is defended, until it is time for me to go and then he traps me between two walls and slits the vein in my throat. <br /><br />I see him come toward me with the blade in his hand, small and serated like a steak knife. I know it will hurt, and it does. My throat ticks blood. <br /><br />We have a long conversation while I bleed. We laugh a lot, and sometimes I forget I am dying, but my eyes keep trying to close. <br /><br />He tells me I should call a doctor. <br /><br />I know. I know. I try to think how I will get up. I don't know where to find a phone. <br /><br />I ask him to hold me. He does. His shoulders are broad and for a second I feel safe and warm but then he pushes me away. <span style="font-style:italic;">I don't trust you</span>, he says. <span style="font-style:italic;">You tried to leave me. I can never love you now.</span><br /><br />I tell him I'm sorry. I am so tired now. I ask him again to hold me. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I can't</span>, he says. <span style="font-style:italic;">You're covered in blood.</span>Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-51564833587679035922011-05-26T17:59:00.001-07:002011-09-15T07:36:26.435-07:00<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ohIVzIZLuQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Dreaming about tornadoes, I wake up and think: I ought to tell you that I love you now because the world is ending but the world is always ending. Tornadoes are everywhere. I grew up in tornado country and I know about bruise-colored clouds with funnels hanging down like dirty little fingers poking out of the sky. I dream about them more and more. <br /><br />They are the perfect food for nightmares, so violent and fickle and specific. What other disaster picks its victims up with such malicious delicacy? They'll rip your neighbor's bedroom out of the ground and spread it over the next two counties and leave your kitchen immaculate, with the cat food in the bowl and the teaspoon in your favorite coffee cup. In the nightmares I'm always doing something else that seems important -- packing to leave town, arguing with a friend -- but once I see the tornado there's only the tornado. It's far away and then it's close and then it swoops down and slaps the glass out of the window like a hand to a face. <br /><br />Wheatsville, yesterday, lunchtime, eating quinoa salad and hippie rootbeer outside on a bench. Two women are crossing the parking lot, bare legs shimmering under their skirts in heat of the first really hot day of summer and then there's that funny moment when you see that the stranger you're staring at is someone you know. I stand up and say Amy Jean's name and she and her friend walk over and that's also someone I know. Her name is Callie. The three of us lifted weights together for a while one summer. <br /><br />I hug Amy Jean and Callie hugs me and everybody sits down. Amy Jean is at that point in being in love with someone wonderful and amazing where it's all she can really talk about, so we talk about it for a while. "It's crazy," says Amy Jean, who two years ago was getting divorced and buying a house and losing her stepfather to cancer. "I mean, I totally would have told you before that I knew what love was. I really thought I did, and this is just so much more incredible than I ever thought anything would have ever felt." They're moving to South America at the end of the summer. <br /><br />This makes me hurt and smile because this is what you say when you're really in love, every time you're ever in love. It's always the first and the best and the last and the always. It <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> the best, always. It's supposed to be.<br /><br />"I mean, I did tons of drugs in art school and none of them ever made me feel this good," Amy Jean says. "I feel totally not afraid and totally sane. Like really not afraid of anything. Like anything could happen, and I would still be good."<br /><br />I say I remember that feeling, when C. and I were first together. "I remember thinking -- it was weird -- but that anything could happen. If he left me, even, I would be fine. I was that much better for ever having been in love like that. Before that being in love was always something really desperate and scary."<br /><br />"Are you still together now?" Callie asks. <br /><br />"Yeah." I've decided to keep the answers to these questions simple. I don't know if I'm being avoidant or polite or both.<br /><br />"How long?"<br /><br />"Almost eight years, I guess. Yeah."<br /><br />"Are you still in love like that? I'm sorry, I guess it's a weird question. I just wonder lately if that's even possible. I don't know if you know, but my husband is leaving me."<br /><br />Now I remember, yes, her hug was a little longer and tighter than I would have expect, a little skin-hungry. I say I'm sorry, which is still, after all these years, the only thing I know how to say. <br /><br />"He left me for one of his students," Callie says. "One of his <span style="font-style:italic;">former</span> students. She's twenty-two. I know, it's really bad. I'm that person. I never thought I'd be that person. My life is this dumb cliche."<br /><br />I get that too. If love makes everything always new, heartbreaks make everything stupidly the same, even the fiercest of them, sucking the color and the shading out of everything. I am a stick figure, you are a stick figure and here we go its <span style="font-style:italic;">this</span> bullshit again. <br /><br />"I have times when I feel really good," Callie says. "Sometimes, like today, I think it's totally going to be OK and I'll find someone else and it will feel really good and this will be over." <br /><br />"It <span style="font-style:italic;">will</span> be like that," Amy Jean says, still lit up inside with new-love-true-love oozing over and she reaches across the table and touches Callie's hand. "It totally will be. You're going to find someone great and you're going to feel amazing."<br /><br />Callie looks at Amy Jean and then at me. <br /><br />"Well, I mean," I say. "It isn't like that all the time. It doesn't stay like that forever. But it's not like somebody pulls a plug in a bathtub and it all drains away either, you know? It has its cycles. It dies back for a little bit. You can have a bad season, a few bad seasons. But hopefully there's something under there, like a good roots system, and it comes back over and over and actually it is pretty amazing. Yeah." <br /><br />Amy Jean is nodding and smiling and drifting away. You can't really hear this kind of thing when you're in love and everything is new. You're not supposed to. All that oxytocin is wiping your brain clean like a wet cloth on a chalkboard so you can bond and have tons of sex and raise babies. She excuses herself and goes into the store and Callie and I sit on the bench a while longer watching the parking lot shimmer like it's all a mirage or else something projected on a sheet that any second could be whisked away to show us what's behind. <br /><br />"It's been hard, honestly" Callie says. "It's been really hard. Some days I feel alright, but other days are just, whatever. What kills me is thinking, you know, we are still actually <span style="font-style:italic;">married</span>. I am his <span style="font-style:italic;">wife</span>. I don't even know where he's staying. He's with her, wherever they are. Driving around in<span style="font-style:italic;">my</span> car, that I paid for."<br /><br />"That is really awful."<br /><br />"I am so sad."<br /><br />"You have a right."<br /><br />We sit for a bit and then I start telling her about this book I was reading on shamanism, this part about initiations. There was one initiation ritual -- I want to say it's Siberian or Inuit, somewhere really cold -- where they take you out and strip your clothes off and leave you in the snow to die. What they tell you is that demons are coming to eat all the flesh off your bones. And they make a prayer for you that all the demons come and every part of you gets eaten. You freeze almost to death and then they come back and get you and thaw you out and if you make it back you come back with all these powers but only over the demons that ate you. Because you can't heal any pain you haven't felt. <br /><br />"That makes sense," Callie says. <br /><br />Amy Jean comes back outside and we talk for a while about something else. Everybody stands up to go. <br /><br />"Hey," Amy Jean says. "I heard you were moving. I completely forgot."<br /><br />"I am moving."<br /><br />"When?"<br /><br />"A few weeks. I'm feeling good about it. This town and I are in a dry season."<br /><br />"It's beautiful there, right?"<br /><br />"It is. The river is about five minutes from my new house."<br /><br />We all hug goodbye for who knows how long and we all promise that they will come to see me and we will go rafting. I hope it works out.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-26905420920296236102011-04-29T13:44:00.001-07:002011-05-26T16:37:31.234-07:00I get home from work in the afternoon and open my door the sound of a power drill. The house was foreclosed on in the earlier part of the year, and it's been sold twice since then, disturbing my quasi-legal squatting arrangement in the west unit, considered uninhabitable due to the leak in the roof, the holes in the floor, and the mold. Somehow I lived there for two years; it went by very fast. <br /><br />So now I am living in the east side of the house with C. again. We are wary but friendly, two refugees crowded into the same tent. All the other tenants are leaving, one by one. The vegetable garden we all shared at the front of the house is torn up. The new owner wants xeroscaping. She's making improvements. No one could blame her. The place needs improving. <br /><br />She hired a guy named Luis to rip down the walls in the ceilings in the west unit and make it all new again. He's been at it ten hours a day for the last few weeks, the hardest working guy in show business. I always wave at him when I go past. I wave at him today. <br /><br />"Almost done," he says. "You want to see?"<br /><br />You always want to see the place where you used to live. We go inside and walk through the rooms, looking at the smooth planes of fresh plaster, the shining white paint and dove-gray trim. For a second I feel like I'm dreaming. Everything is familiar and everything is different. A place I used to live, a long time ago. <br /><br />"Wow. It looks amazing. Good job."<br /><br />Luis wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. "It was a lot of work," he says. <br /><br />"I bet."<br /><br />For a minute when the house went on the market I thought maybe I should try to find a way to buy it. Then I thought, right. Buy this place I've been trying to get free of for the last god knows how many years. Buy this leaking roof and these mold-infested walls, this compromise, and spend the rest of my life trying to make it into something that I want. But that's not how the wind is blowing. <br /><br />We go out on the porch. The yard out here used to be a wild place, a tangle of knotty shrubs and flowering weeks just barely pushed back enough for a few rows of chard and tomatoes and basil and sunflowers. It's all plowed down to the roots now and there's nothing wild about it anymore. <br /><br />"Is she going to have you do the outside next?" I ask.<br /><br />Luis shakes his head. I like his face. All the lines in it go up. "After I finish in there, I'm going home for a while. My son is getting married at the end of the month, back in Mexico."<br /><br />"Congratulations."<br /><br />"And my other son is graduating from college."<br /><br />"Hey, that's great. Congratulations again."<br /><br />"I have good kids," he says. "My son that's getting married, he's a lawyer."<br /><br />"Wow. You must be proud."<br /><br />"All good kids. All my kids go to college. Except for my daughter." He squints out over the yard, into the sun. "My daughter was in college, but she throws it all away to get married. I told her not to do it."<br /><br />"Well, there's always time, right? She'll be OK." <br /><br />"I think so. I think so. But I always tell her, you've got to do your school. Because for a woman, I think it is a lot harder. Do you know what I mean?" He looks at me earnestly. He has the kind of eyes that look like they're really looking at you. I nod. "Because you and me can do the same job," he says. "And I'm always going to get paid more for it. So I think it is harder to be a woman. I think a woman has to try a lot harder."<br /><br />"I know what you're saying."<br /><br />"What about you? Are you in school?"<br /><br />"I'm going back."<br /><br />"Congratulations," he says. "So we are both doing good."<br /><br />We shake hands. <br /><br /> I unlock the door into C.'s place, our place. I am doing homework when he gets home. After a while I look out the window. There's an unfamiliar quality to the light, and then I see the storm cloud, colored orange by the end-of-day light. <br /><br />"Baby, look."<br /><br />It hasn't rained this spring at all. It hasn't rained since anybody can remember when. We are staring down the barrel of a 50-year drought and it's so hot already. It's so hot, and it's not even May yet. <br /><br />C. and I go outside walk down to the end of the street where we can see it better. It is enormous, roiling, and coming fast. Other neighbors are already on the corner, staring up. I recognize the girl from across the alley. "You heard the governor prayed for rain this weekend, right?" she says. <br /><br />"Sweet Baby Jesus," C. says. "Who did he pray to?"<br /><br />"I guess we'll find out." The neighbor girl shivers and wraps her arms around herself. "We ought to get inside before that hits us," she says. <br /><br />We go back to the house and I go back to doing my homework. Once in a while I reach up and turn down the buzzing SC unit to see if I'll hear rain, but I don't. Later I lie in bed, fantasizing about water from the sky, running off the eaves and filling the creeks. I dream of mud puddles and dams over-flowing, but it's no good. In the morning when we wake up the ground is dry as a bone and it's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-27513458935754544052011-04-29T13:39:00.000-07:002011-05-27T16:04:00.121-07:00<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bYBVAfvRpps" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-995805438662123472011-04-21T11:08:00.001-07:002011-04-29T14:08:41.183-07:00dreamIn a kind of hotel room with my parents. My father is telling a joke. Earlier we were going for a walk next to cliffs made of sand. The joke my father is telling is, It's like rape or bad weather, you can't do anything about it, so you might as well lay back and enjoy it. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Stop saying that, Dad. That's not funny. Stop it.<br /><br />What are you, the word police around here? It's a joke. <br /><br />It's not funny. </span><br /><br />My father turns around and starts telling the joke to my mother. She starts laughing. I pick up everything I know will smash and throw it at the wall --<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">It's a joke</span>, my mother says. <span style="font-style:italic;">It's just a joke. All you have to do is laugh. It's easy, see? Watch. <br /><br />But it's not funny. It's not funny, right? It isn't.</span><br /><br />--tea cups, cocktail glasses, framed photographs. The last thing I throw is myself out the door. <br /><br />This is one of those weird dream hotels: hallways of hallways, rooms spilling into other rooms. I hear their voices everywhere. Punch and fucking Judy. Staircases that don't go up or down, just around and around. I run, ripping open door after door after door looking for one, just one, one goddamn door without you behind it.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-4770301172685939922011-04-17T11:53:00.000-07:002011-04-17T12:10:19.313-07:00<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CylxacTBJrQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-10006261398729756672011-04-03T11:53:00.000-07:002011-04-04T15:10:30.764-07:00dreamI am looking at myself in the mirror and my skin is cracking like the bottom of a dried-up river bed. A tag of it is loose on my cheekbone, peeling up, and I take hold of the edge of it and pull and a piece the size of a silver dollar comes away in my hand. I see other tags of skin sticking up and I keep grabbing them and peeling. I peel too much and I start to bleed but I think this is not a bad thing.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-1295997194809025612011-04-03T10:45:00.000-07:002011-04-04T20:08:05.346-07:00Sitting out on my stump in the graveyard, holding my ankle in my hand and crying a little bit. I sprained my ankle last summer around the same time that I broke my heart; they both took longer to heal than I expected, and I wondered if this was because I am older than I used to be. Sometimes it still aches, or I imagine that it does. It's hard to tell. <br /><br />I press my thumb now into the spot where the fibula articulates with the talus. There ought to be a tendon there, but I seem to feel only a crescent-shaped empty space, as if the long bone of the leg had never really touched down into its nest again. I think there is a word for an indentation of this shape and I chew through my mind after it for a while. Sulcus? I think I used to know. <br /><br />The pressing in hurts and the emptiness scares me and I start to tear over. It's easy to cry because I am a little bit drunk. Before I came out to the graveyard I went to lunch with Sammie out at the lake. Sammie drank lemon soda because he had to go back to work and I drank Riesling because I didn't. <br /><br />Sammie had been calling me for a couple of weeks and I'd been letting his calls go because social graces are always the first thing I let lapse when I feel stretched thin. When I finally answered last week he told me he'd bought a new watch. <br /><br />"Neat," I said. <br /><br />"It is neat," Sammie said. "But was really neat was the girl who sold it to me. She had such pretty eyes and such pretty hair and she was so nice. And she gave me her card and told me if I had any questions about the watch I should call her. Do you think I should call her?"<br /><br />"Do you have any questions about the watch?"<br /><br />"Not really."<br /><br />"Can you make one up?"<br /><br />"That sounds complicated. Can't I just ask her out? I mean, the worst thing that can happen is she says no, right?"<br /><br />"Sure."<br /><br />"You don't think that would be creepy?"<br /><br />"No. It would only be creepy if you were a creepy guy, and you're not. Just be casual about it and be prepared to take it gracefully if she says no."<br /><br />"OK."<br /><br />Sammie was a customer of mine when I was a dancer. He used to get panic attacks when he thought about talking to pretty girls. Sammie's parents got divorced when he was three and his mother spent the next seven years dying painfully of cancer and he has been in therapy since basically ever. Paying naked women to talk to him and knowing they would never leave as long as he kept paying them fit into Sammie's schema of life quite well. He used to buy out my whole evenings and I could pay a months rent and bills with what I'd make. I'd feel bad sometimes, but Sammie comes from money and will always come from money and money is not one of the things he has to worry about in this lifetime. <br /><br />We quit going to club around the same time. It didn't work for either of us anymore. We kept in touch, maybe because he really did just finally spend enough to buy a claim on my affections. We ended up knowing a lot about each other, things we can't talk about with too many other people. <br /><br />Today he called me up and said he asked the girl at the jewelry store out and the girl said no. I still think this is progress, and I said so. <br /><br />"Did I tell you I bought a new car?" Sammie said. "It's the kind of car that really needs a girl in it. Can I come and take you for a ride?"<br /><br />I say OK and twenty minutes later Sammie is there in his new car. I know jack-all about cars, but I know this is a beauty. It's a Mercedes with a bunch of letters in its name, tiny and sleek and low to the ground, and I feel a wash of self-consciousness just walking out to the curb. "Way to set my neighborhood on its ear, Sammie," I say. "They all thought I was a really nice girl."<br /><br />"I know. Isn't it great?"<br /><br />Then Sammie makes the car go around curves and corners fast all the way to the restaurant and I cling to the inside of the passenger door and scream and Sammie says, "This, <span style="font-style:italic;">this</span>, is how this car is meant to be driven." <br /><br />Over lunch, over wine and lemon soda, he asks me how things went in San Francisco and I say, "Fine. Well. Kind of underwhelming, really. I don't think they were very impressed with me and I wasn't very impressed with them either, to be honest. I don't think we found each other, uh, relevant." <br /><br />"That's fine," he says. "It's the wrong place for you anyway. You know it's really cold and gray there all the time, right?"<br /><br />"I know. But they have such good Thai food. Anyway, I already got accepted to the other place." <br /><br />"Well, that's great then. Are you happy?"<br /><br />"Mostly."<br /><br />"Your heart's not still broken, is it?" This in reference to a conversation we had on the phone some months ago, when it still was. <br /><br />"No. I don't think so. Just, you know, big changes. New city. New, uh, course of inquiry, or whatever. Whenever you're about to move on from something, you wonder if you did it right, right? If you made the right decisions. If you got everything out of it that you could have. If you really sucked it dry, you know? Or if you're leaving meat on the bones."<br /><br />"Huh. Well, I don't think you need to reproach yourself too much. You've done about as much living as anyone I know."<br /><br />In the final analysis, I think so too. But everybody's got unlived parts of themselves, and those are the dangerous parts. Those are the parts you go projecting onto other people and then grasping after, thinking you'll be whole. <br /><br />"Yeah. Hey, listen, I'm going to have another glass of wine and then I'm going to burst into tears, OK?" <br /><br />And I do. And Sammie is so good about it, so good and nice. He doesn't look around to see if anyone else is looking at us. He sits with me and after a little while he reaches across the table and squeezes my wrist, but only very gentle and not for too long because he would never want to do anything, you know, creepy.<br /><br />After I sprained I had to walk carefully. I found out I'd been bearing my weight too far to the outside of the foot, stretching the ligament out imperceptibly, constantly, til it give way under no provocation at all, really, the slightest shift of weight.<br /><br />Injuries are the best teachers. Some teacher of mine told me that years ago, when I was in the hospital. It was golden to me at the time. In the cemetery later, afternoon-drunk, wine-drunk, the drunk of easy tears, I sit on my stump holding my ankle, pressing into the healed spot, wondering if there's supposed to be something there or if it's OK that there's an empty space.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-55275960868362947672011-03-09T17:27:00.000-08:002011-03-19T07:37:19.073-07:00San Francisco tomorrow for grad school interview. Bought a dress to wear. Gray silk, very pretty. Was supposed to have lunch with the engineer today but he bailed on me by text right before. I was at work, giving the sink a final wipe-down with dilute bleach, last thing I do before I go home for the day, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. <br /><br /><em>Working. Can't do lunch. Can leave early and meet your somewhere though. </em><br /><br />He wants to give me money. He brought it up when I told him last week I was going. For traveling he said. Spending money. <br /><br />I pretend I don't know this. <span style="font-style:italic;">Pretty busy this afternoon. See you when I get back, OK?</span> <br /><br /><em>Want to give you some cash. </em><br /><br /><em>That's so sweet. I don't need a thing, tho. See you when I get back? </em><br /><br />My next text back to him is going to say, <em>I'm not your fucking daughter.</em> I don't know why this money thing is so loaded for me, if it's just compulsive self-sufficiency or what. I wish we could just hang out. <br /><br />Last time we had lunch he felt me up over coffee, grabbed my knees and spun me to face him across the corner of the table. He said, "You don't wear a skirt for me for a year and now you have to go and ruin it with tights? That depresses me." His thumbnail found a rib in my tights and traced it up the inside of my thigh. <br /><br />"How's Beth?" <br /><br />Beth is his new girlfriend. The three of volunteered at a shelter for stay dogs over Christmas. She seems nice. <br /><br />He straightened slightly, kept hold of my legs. "She's fine. We're not seeing much of each other, actually." <br /><br />"Really? Why?" <br /><br />He shrugs. "I don't know. She wants to - whatever you say. Take it to the next phase. I try to tell her I'm too messed up to be in a serious relationship. I can't make anybody else happy if I don't know how to be happy myself, right?"<br /><br />I nod, because this sounds like a sensible thing to say, but I've heard from him it a million times now and I don't nod as much as I used to. This is a re-occurring theme of his, this not being happy, not knowing how. It comes up at every turn, like his bitterness against his mother, like his chronic pain and the shifting roster of pharmaceuticals with which he attempts to manage it. <br /><br />"You don't feel happy when the two of you hang out?"<br /><br />"No. I mean, I like her. But I don't feel anything lately, about anything. I don't even care about sex anymore. It's like I'm watching myself all the time."<br /><br />"Huh. Well. She really seems to like you." <br /><br />After I say this I wonder if I mean it or if I just think it's a nice thing to say. He is not an easy man to like -- exacting, tactless, with a spiteful sense of humor and a childish pleasure in being difficult. He is also, in the long-run, a very good and loyal friend but to notice this you have to watch the things he does and ignore the things he says, and this can be trying.<br /><br />We went to dinner after we left the shelter, he and Beth and I. I watched him pick her apart until she finally slumped forward over the table, burying her face in her hands while I compulsively read the menu over and over and over like I was ten years old having dinner with my parents. When I couldn't stand it anymore I got up and went to the bathroom. Beth came in while I was washing my hands and something about the way her eyes met mine in the mirror made me say, "You know, Maurie's bite is really a lot worse than his bark."<br /><br />"I know." She tossed her head, leaned forward toward the mirror and seemed to be examining her nose. "How long have you two known each other, anyway?"<br /><br />"Gosh. Uh. A few years, I guess. It doesn't seem that long, but it is."<br /><br />"Uh huh. So how did you meet?"<br /><br />"In a yoga class." As far as I know, this is still the cover story. <br /><br />"Oh, right. He told me that."<br /><br />Good. Great. "Yeah, we just kind of hit it off."<br /><br />Her eyes meet mine in the mirror again. I think I see a tinge of disbelief. "You guys seem close."<br /><br />"Yeah, well. He's a great guy. A good friend. We have a lot in common, I guess."<br /><br />"Really." I think she wants to ask me, <span style="font-style:italic;">like what</span>? But I dry my hands off and pick my purse up off the counter. <br /><br />"See you."<br /><br />"See you."<br /><br />She has a right to her suspicions. In truth, it is actually all far more sordid than she probably imagines. Her boyfriend met me like most men meet me, by paying me to take my clothes off. The road from there to here was long and winding, checkered with permutations of loneliness and companionship and affection and hostility, the undue influences of money and sex, the fear of death, and the milk of human kindness. And now we are friends. What the things are exactly that we have in common I couldn't tell you, but we are mutually concerned with one another's well-being, and if there's more to being someone's friend please tell me what it is. <br /><br />So she is right to think it's fishy but at the same time if there's anyone whose legs her boyfriend could be groping under a table over lunch she'd might well want it to be me because the reason he likes me is that he can't make me cry and the reason he can't make me cry is because we are not and have not been and will not ever be in love. <br /><br />I wish he'd let the money thing go, though. My phone buzzes in my pocket again and I don't look at it because I don't want to know what it says. I finish wiping out the sink and throw the dishcloth in the hamper. My coat is by the door. San Francisco in the morning and a gray dress to wear.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-54759433567108724262011-02-25T10:48:00.000-08:002011-02-25T10:49:15.482-08:00<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/cZUZWEc3ElE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-55763164749290424052011-02-22T11:16:00.000-08:002011-02-28T10:31:49.479-08:00dreamI am on the bus and I see I have missed my stop. We are way out in nowhere country, gray sky and grass the color of dirty water. I decide to stay on the bus until it turns around and comes back. I am angry because I will be late. <br /><br />My mother is in my bedroom, going through my dresser drawers. <span style="font-style:italic;">What's this?</span> she says. <span style="font-style:italic;">What's this? What's this?</span> My dancer clothes spill out of her hands and make a history. Fishnets, sequins, fringes. Garterbelts. Stockings soft as whispers. Silk nightgowns. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I'm sorry</span>, I say. <span style="font-style:italic;">I'm sorry. I just thought they were pretty, that's all. </span><br /><br />She screams at me and her voice is a terrible wind and my father is there and his voice is also a terrible wind. They will destroy me, so I fight them like gods always have to be fought, with everything, for your life. I scream back at them, <span style="font-style:italic;">You should be proud of me. I was never afraid. You talk about compassion and loving your neighbor and looking for God in everyone, but I lived it and I never shut my eyes to anyway, not once, I never turned away </span> and the winds rip my words out of my mouth.<br /><br />Back on the bus. We stop in a kind of junk yard. I tell the driver I missed my stop. I'm waiting to go round again. He says this bus only goes one way. I have to get off now. <br /><br />In the junkyard there is a shelter built out of wrecked things. Most of it is underground. I go inside. Two children are playing on a dirt floor. They stop and look up at me with eyes the color of mirrors. I ask them if they are happy. They say they are.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-84237357862064512572011-02-21T15:15:00.000-08:002011-02-23T09:58:32.733-08:00Lunch with Caroline, my old boss. We settle in and I ask about her kids and then after they bring us drinks I ask her how things are at the studio. She shrugs. "Drama," she says. <br /><br />"More trouble with the police?"<br /><br />"No. No more police. But it got broken into. Well, not really broken in. I gave this guy a key, this guy I was dating for a little while. When we broke up I didn't think to get the key back and he broke in and stole my laptop and tore up all my lingerie."<br /><br />"Jesus. Are you serious?"<br /><br />She nods. "You remember that kimono you liked?"<br /><br />"The blue one? With the cranes?"<br /><br />"No, the black. With the little red flowers. He tore it right up to the hip. What a freak, right?"<br /><br />"Seriously."<br /><br />"So I changed all the locks. I think he was stealing money from me, too. Anyway, other than that things are good. What are you doing now?"<br /><br />I tell her I'm working and going to school, and she says, "You're so industrious. Not me. I'm not what you'd call motivated."<br /><br />"That crazy. You work all the time." She is always changing her website, tinkering with her advertising, maximizing profit margins, justifying charging the highest rates in town and flipping the bird to the hobbyists in the adult review boards. <br /><br />"Well, it's different when you're making a lot of money. I don't think I'd roll over in bed for ten dollars an hour. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't do this. I've had tons of other jobs and I always end up quitting." <br /><br />"Well, I know what you mean. I mean, I do miss it." <br /><br />"The money?"<br /><br />"Sort of. I do OK right now, though. But being able to, you know, turn my body into money whenever I felt like it. It was like a super power. Do you know I mean?"<br /><br />"Yeah. Like, you can wake up in the morning with nothing by the time you go to bed you'll have a grand in the bank."<br /><br />"Yeah." <br /><br />Because you can lose it all, over and over again, and make it all back, and you're never stuck in one place. You never have to keep your mouth shut and do what you're told, never have to be anybody's idea of a good sport, a sweet girl, a little trooper, not ever again, not for more than a few hours, anyway. <br /><br />"It's not just the money, though. I mean, I really miss it."<br /><br />"The clients?"<br /><br />"I mean, not specifically, really. But yeah. I don't know if I was really helping people or whatever, but I did feel like I was making connections with people. They come in and really show themselves to you and talk about stuff they can't really talk about with anyone in their lives, and I would hear them and not judge them. And that means something, you know? People don't have that many chances to talk about that stuff and be heard and not be judged." <br /><br />"Well, I do think that helps people," Caroline says. She would say this, of course. This is exactly the kind of service she advertises, with some more stuff about goddess energies and ecstatic bliss states, but in the end it really all boils down to this."<br /><br />"I think so, too."<br /><br />I miss feeling so close to the raw nerve centers of things. I am not very social, and small talk makes me tired. If I'm going to engage with someone, it might as well be real. People are never casual or superficial when it comes to their sexuality, not really, or if they are that in and of itself is fascinating. <br /><br />And then, there was a kind of grace in being a fallen woman in my own mind. A set of questions I didn't have to ask myself anymore. Like, <span style="font-style:italic;">Am I normal</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Would people like me if they really knew everything about me? </span> because <span style="font-style:italic;">No</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Not all of them, probably.</span> <br /><br />I remember back in high school after some new bout of experimenting how I'd curl into myself thinking, "Oh God now I've really done it, really gone too far." Feeling terrible, and also relieved of the awful weight of being good. <br /><br />I put my spoon down on the table harder than I mean to. Throw it, really. I say, "I work in a bakery and teach yoga to children. How fucking wholesome is that? I don't have any <span style="font-style:italic;">secrets</span> anymore."<br /><br />I'm shouting, but in a normal tone of voice, because you never know who's listening. Caroline chews a bite of food and swallows, staring at me the whole time with her habitual expression of mild surprise. "Well," she says. "You know you can always come back and work for me. I'd love to have you back. My little strawberry blonde."<br /><br />I knew she'd ask me if I brought it up. I didn't know what I'd say. I still don't. I spread my hands and shrug. <br /><br />She's warming to the idea now. "It'd be so easy, love. You wouldn't have to lift a hand. Someone would take all your calls and make all your bookings for you and all you'd have to do is show up and do what you do."<br /><br />"I don't know. I don't even know if this make sense. It's just this weird feeling, missing it. I wonder if I'm -- I don't know --addicted or something."<br /><br />"Well, how long has it been? Six months?"<br /><br />"Six or seven. Maybe eight."<br /><br />"You're not addicted, honey. Me, I'm addicted. I told you, I couldn't do anything else. I mean, I've even been thinking -- " she leans forward and lowers her voice even further, "--I've even been thinking about doing full service. And you know I've never done that, never offered that. But I feel like if I'm going to have the kinds of experiences I've been having with men -- I mean, if men are just going to drain me dry anyway, at least I could be getting paid for it. Know what I mean?"<br /><br />I nod. <br /><br />"Anyway, you should really come back. I mean, you can't pay for school working at a bakery, can you? I can have clients for you right away. Tonight if you wanted."<br /><br />I'd never work for Caroline again. She's careless. She makes enemies who call the cops, and she gives keys to the studio to sketchy guys who rip up lingerie. <br /><br />"I don't know. I'll think about it. I'm tempted. But."<br /><br />She pouts. "I don't think you're tempted at all." <br /><br />"I'll think about it. Really."<br /><br />"Well. I'm a bad friend, aren't I? Here you're telling me you think you're addicted and all I want to do is seduce you back."<br /><br />"It's OK. I like being seduced by you."<br /><br />And I let her pay for lunch, because she can turn her body into money any time, and I can't anymore.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-19474041599360967882011-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:002011-02-25T10:31:08.455-08:00Coming home on the bus, twilight. It is cold and has been getting colder all day and then I see a bear, standing at a trashcan by the bus-stop near the highway, not too far from the bar that used to be the Crazy Lady when I danced there a million years ago but is now the town's only all-Spanish strip club, Chicas Bonitas. <br /><br />Of course it cannot be a bear, but I have been reading Arnold Mindell and trying to practice what he calls the second attention. So I watch the cannot-be-a bear rummage through the trash can until the bus pulls up and then it turns around and turns into a woman who gets on the bus and sits down next to me. "Hey, honey," she says. "What're you reading?"<br /><br />I close my book so she can see the cover: <span style="font-style:italic;">Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences.</span><br /><br />"Is it any good?" she asks.<br /><br />I say it is pretty good. <br /><br />"You must be in college."<br /><br />"I am."<br /><br />"Smart girl. I got a degree, too, you know. Course, I'm flying a sign <span style="font-style:italic;">now</span>. Lookit me." She laughs.<br /><br />"What did you study?"<br /><br />"English. Literature. I was a school teacher. In South Florida. Course I wish I was there today." <br /><br />We nod knowingly at each other and pantomime shivering, rubbing our arms with our hands. Her knuckles are red and chapped and so are mine. Lately I have been noticing my age is showing up faster in my hands than in my face. <br /><br />"I liked to party, though," she says. Her eyes drift. "That was always my problem. I was good-looking, though. You know. You <span style="font-style:italic;">know</span>, girl." She nudges me. "I got caught with a kilo of coke."<br /><br />"Oh. Wow." I look at her, trying to see the good-looking, partying, South Florida school-teacher. Her skin is blown and sun-baked to a desert brown. Her hair, dyed blonde at some point, looks harsh as a bristle brush. Her eyes are the color of amber, and then they catch my own with a spark and I see it. I see her on beach in a white dress where waves like champagne bubbles lick her feet and the wind tosses her hair out behind her. <br /><br />The air around her is stale and rich with booze and cigarettes and her own ripe flesh. I don't mind it. "Did you go to prison?" I want to know.<br /><br />She laughs. "Hell, <span style="font-style:italic;">yeah</span>. In Florida. South Florida. I do OK, though. I still got it. My last boyfriend was seventeen years younger than me, you believe that? He was a <span style="font-style:italic;">deejay</span>. At a titty bar I was working at." <br /><br />She straightens, looks at me. I wasn't a dancer," she says. "I was a cocktail waitress." He face relaxes back into a grin. "Still, though, you know. <span style="font-style:italic;">You</span> know. I'm telling you, girl, I got it. Been there, done that. I <span style="font-style:italic;">been there</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">done that</span>, girl." <br /><br />I nod, reach up and pull the cord that tells the driver to stop. <br /><br />"You getting off? This your stop?" She looks out the window and something, I don't know what, clicks together in her brain. She puts her hand on my arm, protectively. "Hey, <span style="font-style:italic;">honey</span>. You're not staying there behind the Shell station are you? That's a...bad place."<br /><br />I promise her I'm not. She strokes my arm. He eyes clear, then cloud again. "That's right. Smart girl. College girl. I must stink like beer, girl. Sorry."<br /><br />The bus stops. I stand up and put my bag over my shoulder. I tell her my name. She tells me hers. We shake hands. "Hey, honey," she says. "Hey, babe, do you have a dollar?"<br /><br />I put my hand in my pocket. There is one dollar in there, exactly. Love is going to cost me something yet again, but this time only a dollar. I find it by feel and give it to her and get off the bus in the dark.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-71218584586785975592011-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:002012-06-19T13:47:57.831-07:00School today; homework due on Tuesday. I have to start keeping a calendar again, so I can write down things like, <span style="font-style:italic;">homework due on Tuesday. </span><br /><br />Luckily it's one of those 18 month calendars, so you can just rip out everything up to January and pretend it never happened. I got this calendar when I was taking bookings for my friend Caroline. So the first few weeks of the calendar is just men's names and phone numbers and lengths of time. Then I stopped, and after that there's just blank pages, weeks and weeks of nothing, of the same stuff every day. Then it says GRE and some dates.<br /><br />I never write down anything interesting here, or I try not to. These are secret, squirrelly times, the times when I'm trying not to write things down. Words are a tough habit to kick. They still spill out from time to time. It starts with lists, but lists turn into more: a line of words, an arc of them, a drum beat of meaning, an scab that keeps breaking open. If I can't quit, at least I try to keep it corralled in the book with the black covers that I leave snugged in the bottom of my purse with the rubber band around it like a straight jacket. Sometimes the words escape onto the backs of envelopes, the bottom of old grocery lists. It always starts with lists. List of things I can't forget. Things I ought to do. Things I never said. Lists of other lists. <br /><br />Old memory: my brother thrusting a sheet of my own handwriting in my face. <span style="font-style:italic;"> What is this? Why do you do this? </span> Snatching at it. Oh my god, don't touch that. Give it back, don't you get it? This is how i keep the world in order. This is how I spin to make the force of gravity that keeps us all in place. You don't know it but the only reason you are not flying off the face of the planet right now is that i have you on a list that says you can stay.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-62156798064855108822010-08-20T09:15:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:41:03.883-07:00Letter: Can I call you "whore"?<span style="font-style:italic;">Dear Grace, <br /><br />I noticed you use the term "whore" to refer to yourself. So I find myself wanting to use the term, but I wonder if I'm prohibited. Much like Dr. Laura caused a public out roar by using the "N" word in her radio show. <br /><br />Can "whore" be used as a term of endearment by someone who isn't one? On this season's True Blood, Lafayette has started calling his cousin, Tara, "Hookah", but he does it in a way the conveys his deep love and respect for her. Maybe he gets away with it because he's black and can use words a middle aged white guy can't.<br /><br />S.</span><br /><br />Dear S., <br /><br />Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't like it one little bit if you called me a whore. While I would know you weren't trying to insult me, it would strike me as clumsy and tasteless. <br /><br />My sex-worker friends and I don't call each other "whore." I know there are circles of friends in which that is totally cool, and that is fine by me. Friendships have their own cultures. If you are in a circle where it is cool to call each other "whore", you will know it. But if you have to ask, the answer is probably not only no, but fuck no. <br /><br />See, whore, like nigger, is not a factual description. It is not a term of endearment. It is, in point of fact, an insult, loaded with layers of hostility and hegemonic oppression. When I invoke that word, I am dealing in some way with my ambivalence about the role and towards myself in the role. This is a minefield into which you would be a fool to tiptoe. <br /><br />You cannot know where my head is at when I say the word "whore." You have no context for knowing. You don't know what it feels like to perform a sex act for money, or what it feels like to be insulted by daylight for the same things for which you are sought out at night, what it feels like to be handcuffed on the hood of a police car for doing work you choose and do well and which harms no one, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a culture's desire and self-loathing and ambivalence around its sexuality. You don't know what it's like to be a whore. Maybe you think you can imagine, but you don't know it in your bones. <br /><br />From time to time a subculture may choose to take in a word that has been used as a tool of alienation and oppression, a word that expresses not only "otherness" but the wrongness and dirtiness of that otherness. We may adopt it to claim it's power, play with it and bat it around to rob it of its sting, alchemize it through our experience into a term of inclusion and acceptance. But once we have done this, we can't help thinking of the word as ours. When you say it, it means something different, because you are speaking a different language. <br /><br />Unfair? Sorry. <br /><br />I know it's probably meant in a friendly spirit. You want me to know that you don't see me as different, or that you feel like the difference is casual enough to kid around about. But we are different. And maybe I'm the one to whom the difference isn't casual.<br /><br />Sometimes the most genuine show of friendship is to admit what you don't know about someone, show them respect, and give them some space. See, for camaraderie to work, you have to be someone's comrade. And if you were really my comrade, you would already know that I don't like to be called "whore." <br /><br />Love and Friendship,<br />GraceGracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-48300531356638021072010-01-12T13:02:00.000-08:002010-01-28T07:42:03.130-08:00deathbed confessionsHere are the responses -- mine and those of the friends who were good enough to join me -- to my Facebook Writing Assignment, "Deathbed Confession." <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Wool on the Barbed Wire</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">by Grace</span><br /><br />You look familiar. You're not mine by blood. I never had my own children. Are you brother's daughter, my little string bean? My brother's daugter's daughter? It doesn't matter. I always thought blood-ties were over-rated anyway. It's nice of you to sit with me. That's enough to make you mine. <br /><br />I want to tell you that I was born in the country, that I always thought of myself as a good, shy girl. Even when I was naked in nightclubs hustling strangers for cash, even when men shouted at me over the music, "What, YOU? Shy?" <br /><br />Yes, I was always shy. I was born that way. I stayed that way my whole life. I learned to act in whatever way the circumstances demanded of me but I was always the person I was born to be. That's the first thing I want you to know. <br /><br />When I was still young I left home and moved to the city. I learned how to make men fall in love with me so I could eat -- sometimes for a long time, sometimes just for the length of a song. I can't teach you how to do it. It's like learning to fly in dreams. You keep falling until you learn how to fall without hitting the ground. <br /><br />Sometimes I fell in love, too, and when I did I always left part of myself behind, the way a sheep leaves it's wool on the barbed wire as it squeezes through. I was warned that this was a bad idea, and one day there would nothing left of me. This turned out to be incorrect. What's left of me is here in this bed, dying. The things I left behind me, whether they were found and kept and woven into something warm or whether they just blew away like dust, that's what will remain of me when I am dead. <br /><br />All my life I had a dream. I called it by the names of cities and ambitions and lovers. I followed it down halls and towards horizons. It had a voice like a beautiful girl. It sang me to sleep in cold rooms at dawn. <br /><br />Sometimes I thought my dream was called "being free." Other times I thought it's name was "being safe." Some days to stop it's piping voice I told myself there was no freedom and no safety, but it kept singing. <br /><br />I never reached it. I never held it in my hand. I was always behind, following and now I know if I'd caught it would have stopped singing. It still sings, and so I still have something to follow. <br /><br />Listen. If my advice means anything to you, I'd say don't avoid pain. Pain taught me some of my best lessons. Don't fall in love with pain either. After all, it's just a sensation. You could probably learn as much from joy or love, and if you're still listening I suggest you learn how. That's what I plan on doing, next time round. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Magical Aura of Things I've Seen Firsthand</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">by S.</span> <br /><br />I guess it’s time for me to pass any final words on to you all. Since our family tree seems to be of the bonsai variety, it’s worth an attempt to preserve our dwindling family’s collective wisdom. Unfortunately, I can barely tell you anything about my ancestors and I suspect your generation will fare no better. Although I’m inclined to tell you about walking uphill both ways to school in the snow and my $1.60/hr first job, I suspect the world you’re inheriting will be much worse than anything I can exaggerate about surviving. When I was your age, a gallon of leaded gas was 74 cents, I could see two movies at the drive-in for $1 and my first apartment was $120/month. You’ll likely run out of gas, water, food, jobs and affordable places to live. We chose to mortgage your generation to maintain ours for longer than it made sense and I’m truly sorry for that.<br /><br />Way back in 2009, I saw a movie about a man who lived for 15,000 years. He had witnessed many pivotal historical events and had over 20 degrees. Still, he found that he had little wisdom to pass on to the folks he was leaving behind. This seemed quite strange to me at first, but he explained that his educational degrees were often worthless 10 years after he earned them. It was impossible for any person to maintain his knowledge in a wide variety of subjects as the rate of change had been geometric for way too many decades. Keep in mind that every couple of years, mankind produces more data than the sum total of the previous 5000 years. There is little I can teach you that will be relevant next year, much less in twenty. No doubt, our greatest technical thinkers of today will all seem quaint and even naive, perhaps even in their own lifetimes. Brace yourself to never stop learning. It’s the only way you’ll survive.<br /><br />Similarly, historical events are molded after the fact to make the memories more precious or otherwise marketable to the masses. The real stories are seldom as interesting or profound and who am I to try and deflate the magical aura of things I’ve seen firsthand. Go create your own history.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Better and Better</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">by some guy on Facebook</span><br /><br />I know now, during my life, that I was always changing how I remembered who I was and what I accomplished in the past. Consequently seemed things just kept getting better and better for me until this dying part came up.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Sunshine of Your Understanding</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Anonymous</span><br /><br />To my two glorious daughters:<br /><br />Well, it's that time, I guess. The sand has almost passed through the hourglass. The candle is burning to a nub and is nearly quenched. The cereal box is starting to pour out just that sugary powder. The metaphors are becoming painfully strained. And girls, I don't need to tell you, this cancer is out of control. I'm in terrible pain. My only consolation these days is popsicles and palliative care. And your visits too, of course, my angels; that is, when I'm awake for them. I always rather preferred a bottle of Pinot Noir, but holy shit, I'm in the major leagues now, let's give it up for these narcotics...<br /><br />Now is the time for simplicity. Now is the time for coming clean. Now is the time for you to know what you should know about your Dad.<br /><br />Two things you already know: that I've loved you with all my heart, every day, and that you've always made me proud. Yes, these things you know, because I told you as often as possible, in my own bashful way. What you ceased believing at some point, and what your mother and I succeeded at (re-)convincing you of only after great effort -- is that you were, both of you, conceived in love, despite our divorce when you were at the tender ages of 14 and 10. You went through some years of shock and anger, but by the time you went off to college, you seemed to have cast aside the indignity of seeing your parents go their separate ways. At one time I thought we would never be forgiven. Now I bask in the sunshine of your understanding.<br /><br />In the haze of my recollections, I die with no need to make apologies for my life. I enjoyed, often intensely, some of its thrills (love, sex, artistic accomplishment, sport), and also experienced some of its agonies (unexpected death, personal rejection, artistic blockage, loss of love). I regret not having taken more risks -- not because I wanted to "make my mark," but simply because the unlived life is not worth examining.<br /><br />I helped when my help seemed useful. I acknolwedged my good fortune and gave to others, anonymously more often than not; whether or not I was generous in the big picture, who can say? But I gave. I avoided conflict, maybe too much in some people's opinion, but always in the spirit of "Live and let live." I managed my addictions with such care and dedication that you probably didn't even know them as such. But addictions they were -- private addictions for a (mostly) private man. In the big scheme of things, barely noteworthy.<br /><br />Epitaphs are for egoists. I have no delusions about my mortality or my insignificance. You are mine, and I am yours. Enjoy this life, obey your spirit, and be grateful for your life in whatever way you see fit. That's all that matters. I will love you always.<br /><br />Dad<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Like Gold</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Anonymous Internet Friend</span><br />This is my confession. I was always a lonely person, desperate for affection. When I was young, I got married to a girl that I found broken and vulnerable, and I sucked her in with half-truths and outright lies, just so I wouldn't be alone. But I treated her like gold, for all that, as I always treated anyone who showed me kindness.<br /><br />Eventually, she left me. And she did terrible, terrible things to me when she did.<br /><br />And then I met my second wife. I told her the truth about who I was, and she liked me anyhow, and I wooed her with dedication and an unswerving will that has seen me through all the bad times, and gotten me many things that I wanted in life.<br /><br />But I didn't love her, even though I told her I did. I just didn't want to be alone.<br /><br />It only occurred to me some years later that, at some point, I had fallen in love with her. I even knew when it clinched home. She'd had an epileptic seizure, about two years into our relationship. I remember finding her on the floor. Her breathing was so shallow that I thought she was dead.<br /><br />It felt like my world was ending.<br /><br />And that, I think, is when my love for her turned like the tumblers in a lock and clicked into place.<br /><br />I never told her. I never will.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Good Songs on the Tongue</span><br />by<a href="http://vaderonice.com/?p=537"> Vader on Ice</a><br /><br /><br />I know you people. Your names are like good songs on the tongue. The doctor said… Well… I told the doctor to fuck himself. I been telling people that forever. People not in the room. Some in the dirt. Some sailing. Some looking into someone else’s eyes. I’ll tell you a trick. Anyone who says they know what you need is selling you a lie. All you ever need is a moment. In a storm, you need…<br /><br />Your mothers and fathers were good. I maybe made them too hard. That’s why they cry at some movies. They only feel in the dark. They are blind and dumb in the heart. I always said I’d do it different than my old man. First thing I did was put his name on the boy. Like he did with me.<br /><br />So. It’s very important you listen to me when I tell you to forget everything I ever told you. I’m the guy whose favorite song is from Hootie. I know you don’t know who that is. Was it great music? A lot of people hated them because a lot of people liked them. Do I remember the words?<br /><br />Yes.<br /><br />Let her cry. Let the tears roll down her face. And if the sun comes up tomorrow…Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-68899563610829981782009-07-06T13:23:00.000-07:002009-07-15T07:37:33.905-07:00embarcadero<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU1TWX6kRAFfeVIo_FpKb7ydAQyYvltBVhJ2A19mEk2b2bq8Rd67mL4yDj55aKUN5I46-29UyvkQN6FSqrZ-dUOLdS-BdaRNjrwj1wcgtV5bMV4mTji7yah6iEAUuVXrhszQsStQ/s1600-h/embarcation-6d1599.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 186px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU1TWX6kRAFfeVIo_FpKb7ydAQyYvltBVhJ2A19mEk2b2bq8Rd67mL4yDj55aKUN5I46-29UyvkQN6FSqrZ-dUOLdS-BdaRNjrwj1wcgtV5bMV4mTji7yah6iEAUuVXrhszQsStQ/s320/embarcation-6d1599.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5349473345435487810" /></a><br />After some soul-searching, this is the future of Grace Undressed: <br /><br />This blog will remain at this site indefinitely, accessible to anyone. I also have a new blog, where I will be doing most of my writing from now on. Not saying I won't pop up here once in a while, but my life is weirder and darker than before, and requires a greater degree of privacy, in keeping with which, the new blog will be members only, available by subscription. <br /><br />I commit to posting on the new blog no less than once a week, for not less than one year. I haven't got the ghost of an idea what I'll be doing a year from now -- my life now is a maze of temporary solutions -- but you will know as soon as I do. <br /><br />General Public: A subscription is $25 -- the price of one lap-dance and one drink, or about what you would pay for a hardback copy of my book if I wrote a book, only this is more fun because I don't know the ending any better than you do. You can subscribe by making a donation to my PayPal account -- bright yellow button located over there in the side bar. <br /><br />IMPORTANT: An invitation will be sent to the address registered with your PayPal account. So, if this address is not correct, please include the correct address in the message PayPal allows you to send with your donation. <br /><br />Facebook Friends: Subscriptions are available to <a href="http://www.facebook.com/graceundressed">my imaginary friends</a> at a reduced fee of $15 -- the paperback price. <br /><br />Students, Artists, Sex-workers, and Sweet Young Things: It wouldn't be a party without you, so a number of slots are reserved with you guys in mind. Give what you can and/or write to me at graceundressed at g mail d0t c0m and tell me why you want to read. It will help if you a) have been a regular commenter in the past b) have a kick-ass blog of your own and/or c) spell and punctuate your e-mail carefully. <br /><br />I hope to see you at the party. To those of you who cannot or choose not to subscribe, it has been great having you along and I wish you all the best. Maybe I'll publish a book one day and we can catch up then. <br /><br />Peace. Namaste. <br /><br />GraceGracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-19816484286084037552009-06-19T14:57:00.000-07:002010-07-10T10:54:47.586-07:00no experience necessary"What clubs did you dance in?" Tom wants to know. Just small talk, before the dancing starts. <br /> <br />Tom is some kind of attorney. He got divorced two years ago and has lived in this apartment ever since, which is weird because it doesn't look like anybody really lives here. There's a couch and a coffee table and a big TV and that's pretty much it. Nothing on the walls. No smell. This whole place is as bare of personality as a nice hotel. <br /><br />"A few," I say. "But I started at the Crazy Lady." <br /><br />I always milk this line for laughs. The Crazy Lady was a dump, a dive, squeezed into a little strip along the access road, between a porn store and a discount coffin outlet. <br /><br />"No shit?" Tom says. "I used to go there in college. Wow. The Crazy Lady. I should have met you back then."<br /><br />Yeah. Except back then there was no me. Back then there was only a scrawny stripper named Jordan in a ratty wig and before that there was nothing -- a tired teenage waitress on the late-late shift at a diner by the highway. Everything else sitting on this couch tonight, the long red hair and the gym body and the glossy lips -- all this I made up in the meanwhile. <br /><br />My first day of dancing I walked out of the dressing room with my wig pinned down to my head with bobby pins. I'd filled out a W-9 in the office with the lady manager, who inspected my thong to make sure it was "legal" -- i.e. not transparent or break-away. And then she'd turned me loose. <br /><br />There were only three or four men in the club, and they were all sitting with girls already. All except for one guy, about my age. Curly hair, I think. I walked up and stuck out my hand and said my name and then my mind went blank. Until this very moment in time I had had approximately three modes of social behavior: invisibility, impassioned earnestness, and -- method of choice with possibly attractive members of the opposite sex -- weird sarcasm. None of which was going to get me anywhere. <br /><br />So I sat next to this young guy, this boy, although he hadn't exactly asked me to. I must have asked some questions, must have tried to make what I thought was small-talk. I guess I asked him if he went to the university; campus was just across the highway. I remember he said yes. I told him I went there, too. I wanted him to know that I was smart, that I could be anywhere I wanted right then, and I was there because I wanted to be. Not nervous. Not desperate. <br /><br />I thought I saw him eyeing me, weighing me -- judging, and discarding. It didn't occur to me that he might be uncomfortable, embarrassed, or shy. In my panic, it was all, all about me. I saw his mouth turn thin and smug. I wanted to wipe that look off. I cared, suddenly, what he thought, this absolute stranger whom I would never know. I wanted to change his mind. I wanted to make him want me, make him know he was fucking lucky to have me sitting there, jumping to take my dress off for the low, low price of $20.<br /><br />We ran out of things to say. There was an awful little pause. I asked him if he wanted a lapdance just to put and end to it. He looked at me sideways. "I think I'll pass," he said. <br /><br />"OK."<br /><br />I got up. The club was so small. There was nowhere to go but back in the dressing room, so I went. The "dressing room" was really just a short, cramped hallway behind the stage with a row of decrepit high-school gym lockers pushed up against one wall, covered in graffiti and torn, glittery stickers that said "99% Angel" and "Princess" and "Boys Suck." It smelled like mildew and cheap make-up and it was always cold. In those first weeks, I spent a lot of time back there. <br /><br />I didn't give my first dance until the end of that first day, and I was so desperate by then to be giving one that I barely remember it. His name was Neil and he was pretty fat. When I was dancing at the Crazy Lady, I used to say a good day was a day when I didn't remember any of their faces. <br /><br />The men there on the dayshift were guys who didn't have anywhere else to be. They were plumbers and electricians stopping in between jobs, day laborers who didn't get hired that day, retired guys living on fixed incomes. They didn't have much money, and all any of us girls wanted was to take that little bit away. Relations between the dancers and the customers were tense at best. <br /><br />We knew they would give us the money, sooner or later -- not because they like us, but because we are the only option they've got. They knew if they waited till we were desperate we would beg the DJ to run a 2-4-1 special. Resentment and discontent hung in the air there like a smell. I taught myself a basic hustle of big eyes and persistance, my face wiped blank like a slate. Smile, nod, play dumb but not too dumb: a bubble-gum naivete -- just smart enough to understand your jokes. <span style="font-style:italic;">Like me. Please like me. Feel sorry for me. Give me your cash. </span><br /><br />The guy in the suit who walked in that one summer afternoon stuck out like a sore thumb. Aaron. He said his name was Aaron, and he said he only stopped in because the club is right off the access road to the highway and it's rush hour and traffic is standing still. <br /><br />Sure. Whatever. I don't care. I just hope he brought some money with him, because it's getting boring sitting back in the dressing room watching little blond Celeste dreamily run her hair-dryer up and down her white arms and legs. <br /><br />He is tall and thin, and going bald, not in a bad way. He has a nice smile. He does not seem to be angry at me for having breasts and charging money to look at them. When I ask him to dance he says yes right away. <br /><br />I dance. In the dark, I look pretty. They always keep this club so dark, and my pale skin glows in the blacklights. Even my wig looks great, if you don't look too close. I have just learned how to glue false eyelashes to my upper lids. I made $42 on my first day, and I went to the dollar store and bought lipstick. <br /><br /> After the dance, Aaron keeps talking. I like him. He's funny, and smart. He also gives me $20 to sit with him while he talks. I like him even more. He starts telling me about himself -- his job, which sounds impressive. His house. The trips he's taken. I understand that this man in his suit is trying to impress me. Behind my stripper smile, I am really smiling.<br /><br />I have an imperfect but solid understanding that this is probably not real. When he starts asking me out, I smile and shake my head. Bubblegum. Big eyes. I say, "You don't even <span style="font-style:italic;">know</span> me."<br /><br />He is leaning forward. His body is taught as a wire. "Listen," he says. "I'm a really great guy. I swear. I wrote a book about bicycling in Mexico. I'm awesome. You owe it to yourself." He's funny. I laugh. It feels -- interesting. I have a sense of having been handed a kind of power, but I have no idea what to do with it. It's not really real. It feels kind of real, though. <br /><br />I remember him saying, "Please." I remember him pulling a pen out of his pocket and writing his name down, first and last. "Please, I have to go. What can I say or do in the next five minutes to convince you to come with me? Listen, I'm going down to the coast. I have a boat down there, a little sailboat. I want you to come sailing with me this weekend. Please."<br /><br />I keep shaking my head. I run out of things to say. Finally, I take the napkin. I tell him I'll call. I feel guilty. My palms are sweating. At this point in my life, I have done very little lying. <br /><br />"You will? No, you won't. Will you? Jesus."<br /><br />He does leave, finally. I take the napkin back to the dressing room and tuck it into the front pocket of my backpack. Later I take it out and read his name to myself silently, first and last. It is a beautiful, alliterative name. <br /><br />I see myself sitting at the prow of a little sailboat, dangling my feet down so the spray of each wave as we crest it slaps up the inside of my thighs. When I was small, my family had a little boat like this. We took it out in the summers, and had sandwiches with pimento cheese spread. Big motorboats would go by us, throwing up huge wakes that made our tiny boat rock and yaw. <br /><br />But I am not ten and these are not the yellow-green waters of the Chesapeake. This is the gulf, and the waters are blue as steel. I hear seabirds and cracking canvas. My arms smell like sunlight and salt. At this time in my life, I do not even own a bathing suit; if I want to swim I wear cut-offs and a man's undershirt. They'll kick you out of the city pools like that, so I go to the greenbelt and wade down the muddy banks to swim. On the deck of Aaron's boat, my bathing suit is two-piece, yellow with white polka dots.<br /><br />Aaron is on the boat somewhere behind me, at the rudder, but I do not see him. Later I will go back and he will be there. My mind never goes any farther than this. <br /><br />"Are you ready to dance?" Tom asks. <br /><br />"Born ready." I put the music on, stand up and put my hands on his shoulders. I start to sway. I start to pull my shirt over my head, and teasingly turn away just at the moment when my breasts would pop out. <br /><br />"Wow," Tom says. "You're great. I wish I would have met you at the Crazy Lady. We should have met then."<br /><br />I laugh and finish taking off my shirt, toss it at him. Sure. We should have met years ago, when I was young. You were married then, of course, and I wouldn't have left a club with a customer to save my life, but if this is your dream I'll dream it with you: We would have been the ones to save each other and neither of us would be here now, in this barren room that still smells like paint making this transaction of skin for cash, survival for survival.<br /><br />Sure, baby. Sure.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-59997029350965450152009-06-05T19:09:00.000-07:002009-06-13T10:22:22.863-07:00not now, but soonJim found my blog and read the last post. He e-mailed me and we had one of those largely pointless exchanges singular to people who spend too much time online. <br /><br />But my very real chagrin -- because nobody should have to read another person's uncensored opinion about themselves, ever -- was squelched for good around the time he envinced to be shocked (but <span style="font-style:italic;">shocked</span>!) that I would publish something as private and personal as our lunchtime conversation online. Given that the culture of review-posters more or less revolves around the online airing of intensely private moments -- who does what and for how much and will she take the condom off -- this seems just a little rich. <br /><br />So, Jim, this is what it's like to be reviewed. I don't blame you if you don't like it. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't either. <br /><br />Enough of that. But it is a good reminder that times have changed and the days are over when I can blithely talk a ton of shit about whoever I choose (names and identities properly obfuscated) with the security that no one is really listening. It's been a year since the Boing-Boing folks showed up, and once I got over the initial shock, it has been a hell of a party. <br /><br />Still, times have changed. Blogging has been a lot like dancing in a certain way, with the mirror-twin pleasures of exposure and anonymity. The perfect drug for shy exhibitionists like me -- naked on a lighted stage in front of a house of strangers, and no one knows my name, or anything about me, really, except what I choose to show. <br /><br />But the island of my privacy is getting a little smaller all the time. If you've been reading for a while, you know I don't post as much as I used to. I have to think harder before I do, every time. For months, I've been thinking about quitting. I went out and bought myself a journal, the real kind, with covers. It's good, but it's not the same. I've thought about running away and starting a new blog, but I'd miss your tiny voices, my old imaginary friends. <br /><br />So I don't know what I'm going to do, but something's going to have to change. Maybe not quite, quite yet. But soon.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20440617.post-75016453729320011102009-06-01T17:10:00.001-07:002010-07-10T10:56:16.833-07:00the hobbyistThere is something preposterous about Jim and at the same time something mysterious. <br /><br />Jim was a customer of mine. Sort of. Not a great one. He never bought many dances, and he talks a lot -- softly, quickly, continuously. There never is a good moment to get up and walk away. You just have to get up and go. Then again, the things he says are fascinating, whether they are true or not. Some of them seem like they could not possibly be. Others I know for myself are fact. <br /><br />I used to ask him to tip me for my time. "Oh my God," I would say. "I could just sit here and listen to you talk all night." (True.) "I've totally lost track of time." (Not true. I am a cyborg with a digital time-keeping device implanted in my lower left eyescreen. I know exactly what time it is all the time and every ten minutes an alarm goes off that says you owe me money.) "I could have made a hundred dollars by now if I was <span style="font-style:italic;">working</span>!" <br /><br />Gee <span style="font-style:italic;">whiz</span> mister, and he would reach deep into his pocket and pull out a money clip stuffed with cash -- now who on earth carries a <span style="font-style:italic;">money clip</span> stuffed with <span style="font-style:italic;">high-denomination bills</span>? I have to think that the bottom 3/4 of it is all ones with just some Bens and Grants and Andies dressing up the outside -- but he peels off $100 and gives it to me. And I open up my eyes like tin cups, Gee <span style="font-style:italic;">thanks</span> mister. <br /><br />A friend who works at another club he frequents told him I was dancing privately now. He e-mailed me. We agreed to go to lunch. I did not think Jim would probably be very interested in getting private dances from me. Jim's extracurriculars are at another level. He is what you call a hobbyist, one of those men for whom paying for sex is not only an expediency but a lifetsyle and an all-consuming passion. They hang out in the Locker Room forum on ASPD and coin the acronyms -- DFK, GFE, DATY -- that make some of my favorite sex acts sound like something being traded on the NYSE. They have elaborate personal scoring systems for the women they pay for sex, based on their age, their looks, whether they are pro or non-pro. They have ATF's. They have types. <br /><br />Jim's type is <span style="font-style:italic;">young</span>. Not dancers -- waitresses. New waitresses, green but not innocent, knocked around a little bit already but still fool-hardy. He takes them out to lunch and opens the door for them. He treats them to the hair salon and the nail salon and Nordstrom's for a pretty dress and a pair of shoes and then to a comedy club downtown and then back to a hotel room where they fuck, for about the price she would have made in tips that day if it had been an average-good day. <br /><br />Jim tells me all this over lunch, explicitly. Some of it I knew or guessed before. He describes his last girl for me, tells me her name and I remember her: a pugnacious little cocktail waitress with glossy, dark corkscrew curls and pale, slender arms and legs. She was 20. Jim says she used to meet him at the club and leave with him, ditching her car in the parking lot so her boyfriend would think she was at work. <br /><br />He says she's a dancer now, but not doing well. She called him up a few nights ago, panicked, begging for money. He met up with her and gave her a few hundred bucks. "I told her she shouldn't have started dancing," he said. "She's the kind of girl you want when you can't have her."<br /><br />As always, I am appalled and transfixed. I feel like I'm talking to an invented character. He can't be real. Maybe he <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> a woman. Maybe he is a pathological liar. Maybe he is a kingpin of the underground. I just don't know. And always so open with me, I don't know if he is confessing, or oblivious, or truly, gloriously unashamed. <br /><br />"I like girls who've never been anywhere or done anything," he told me once. "They're easier to impress." And another time: "I want someone I can't picture myself with in real life." And again, "I don't want someone who might make me feel insecure. You know us men, our fragile egos."<br /><br />I can't say I've known a lot of men with egos quite this fragile, or haven't known them well. I try to be a little careful with the kind of men I know. <br /><br />He says things like that, <span style="font-style:italic;">us men</span>. He speaks for all men everywhere. He speaks for men everywhere now when he tells me that I'll never make a living doing what I'm doing, just dancing. "You know guys are going to be disappointed when they find out there's no desert menu," he says. <br /><br />"Everybody knows that up front," I tell him. "I make it really clear. The only guys who do business with me are the ones who want what I offer."<br /><br />He shakes his head. He tells me it will never work, and when that doesn't get me, he leans across the table, whispering, covering my hand with his: "Listen, honey, it's not safe. Sooner or later you're going to get raped. It happens to all the girls. Can't you just work for an agency? At least you'd have somebody looking out for you."<br /><br />I am pretty confident there is no agency out there that would screen as obsessively as I do, that would look out for me as well as I look out for me. With all that, I know there is a non-zero chance that something bad will happen to me, but that's true every time you leave the house. Or even if you don't leave. <br /><br />Besides, I can't really work for an agency because I don't do sex. <br /><br />"I can't work for an agency. I don't have sex."<br /><br />"I know, honey, I know. Say anything you want, but sooner or later some guy is going to make up his mind he's getting laid and he's going to <span style="font-style:italic;">get</span> laid, understand? It always happens. Listen to me. I used to be part owner of an agency in Houston, and it happened to one of our girls, and it was a guy we all knew, a guy who was part of the community. It happens, you know. Guys are guys."<br /><br />Which is not a particularly great argument for agencies and the screenings that they do, or for references, or for the so-called community, or for Jim. I don't know what to say. I'm still deep in the empathy-space I go into when I'm working, even though it is perfectly obvious to both of us by now that we are not doing business together. <br /><br />I'll think about this story later and I'll want to say, Fuck you. Fuck your part-time pimping and fuck you for getting your girl raped. You are a lousy pimp, maybe lousier than most pimps, because you're really a mortgage broker or something and it's only a hobby to you so you don't even give the fuck you would give if it was your livelihood. <br /><br />I shrug, fork up a cluster of salad. I tell him I feel about as safe as I've ever felt. <br /><br />"But, sweetie, can't you at least go to a modeling studio or something? Somewhere you'd be safe. Somewhere somebody would look after you. I'm just worried about you, OK? You're a fantastic woman and I would really hate to hear that you got hurt."<br /><br />I think of the modeling studios you drive past as you leave town: Mardi Gras, Ramses, Foxxies, The Doll House. Weird little storefronts tucked into shady little strip malls, next to porn stores and sex shops and the cheaper kind of nail salons. I've never been inside of one, but I imagine it's a lot like the lower-end clubs I've worked in -- the Crazy Lady or the Glass Slipper in Boston. It's small. The carpet is damp and smells damp, so at the end of the day you need a thirty-minute shower just to get the smell off you. People come and go in dark hallways lit with black-lights to make your white G-string glow like some kind of underwater fish. It feels like 1 a.m. at every time of day and it's always hovering over you, the silent pressure of <span style="font-style:italic;">everyone else is doing it and if you want to make money you will too</span>. <br /><br />"Nah," I say. "I think I'm pretty happy with the way things are going."<br /><br />He throws his hands up in a heavens-what-will-we-ever-do-with-you gesture. "I guess you know best," he says. <br /><br />I sneak a look at him over my next tine of salad, sopping with thin vinagrette. This is not really a very nice restaurant. I don't care if the menu is in French. <br /><br />I would not have sex with Jim for any amount of money the two of us could ever agree on. Not just because he's ugly. I stopped looking at people's outsides a long time ago. It doesn't make sense when you're a dancer. What people looks like doesn't matter. What matters is if they will look in your eyes and listen when you say no and touch you like they would like to be touched instead of fondling you and rolling you around like a melon at fruit stall. <br /><br />It's not just because Jim's skin looks like the top of my kombucha jar. I'm not that shallow. Or maybe I am. And if I am, well, then I wouldn't make a very good escort, even if I wanted to. God knows I haven't got any moral or ethical dilemma with it. The two main components of escorting -- money and sex -- are both things I like a lot. But goddamn if I'm not just picky. <br /><br />After lunch Jim walks me to my car. "You know," he says on the way, "I've always thought you were one of the bravest women I ever knew."<br /><br />Huh?<br /><br />He makes a fluttery gesture with his hand over his belly. "You know. The scar."<br /><br />Oh. That. I don't even think about it anymore. <br /><br />"You never covered it up. You were just out with it. And all the other girls worrying about how to pay for their boob jobs."<br /><br />Smile. Laugh. Shrug. Hug. I don't have anything left to say.<br /><br />One time he told me he'd never ask a woman to sleep with him if he didn't know she'd say yes. "I don't want to be shot down," he said. "Men hate to be shot down."<br /><br />Everybody hates to be shot down, not just men. He comes close though, as he's hugging me goodbye. "If you ever want to do the professional girlfriend thing, you know who to call first," he says. "When you're ready for somebody to take care of you."<br /><br />End hug. Disengage. Smile again. Still deep in empathy space, although we no-sale'd so long ago I couldn't even find you the receipt. So maybe the empathy thing is not something I do for the customers. Maybe it's something I do for myself. <br /><br />I roll the window down to wave as I pull out of the parking lot and then he's gone except for the smell of his cologne which will make it with me all the way home.Gracehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13246990884639753146noreply@blogger.com29