No, not Charles III. That guy isn’t sexy or fabulous at all, not at all – in my humble opinion, and I could care less about this weekend’s coronation, which celebrates an empire whose role in the slave trade and the colonization of a huge swath of real estate all over the globe is softened, and too often forgotten or overlooked because ~ oh because of those plummy accents, and great TV shows, Shakespeare, too, I guess, and yes, the royal fucking family in all their collective dysfunctional glory. Puh-leeze. Palestine. Nigeria. Kenya. South America. The U.S., Pakistan, and India – among many, many others, all these countries bear the legacy wounds and scars of the British Empire’s grasping, greedy, grotesquely punishing depredations. Independence Day, ours and that of sixty-five other countries around the world (and counting), is the single most common national holiday after Christmas. Really? Really.
No. I am not speaking of Charles Windsor or, rather, Charlie Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which is the royals real, pre-WWI, name. I am speaking of course of The King, The King: Clark Gable. Clark Gable, the anointed King of Hollywood’s Golden Era and primas rex of my pitter-pattery heart since oh – since forever. Clark Gable. Otherwise known simply as Gable. Gable, Gable, Gable, Gable, Gable. Or, in his better-known roles, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler (GWTW), as Peter Warne (It Happened One Night), as Fletcher Christian (Mutiny on the Bounty), as Dennis Carson (Red Dust), as Alan Gaskell (China Seas), as Gaylord Langland (The Misfits), as Blackie Gallagher (Manhattan Melodrama), as Jack Thornton (Call of the Wild), as Jim Lane (Test Pilot), as Andre Verne (Strange Cargo), as Van Stanhope (Wife vs. Secretary), as Victor Marswell (Mogambo), as Blackie Norton (San Francisco), Ace Wilfong (A Free Soul)… I could go on and on, and yes, I’ve seen them all, although I haven’t viewed The Misfits as often as many of the others; it’s simply too heartbreaking to do so, due to the subject matter, the well-known drama going on during the shoot, and the sad fact that Gable, Monroe, Thelma Ritter and Montgomery Clift would all die not long after the film wrapped, each of them much, much too soon. I’ve even seen Parnell, which is a total turkey, along with a few other lesser films he could have skipped but a man has got to work, y’know?
Clark Gable. I am sure I knew who he was before Mr. Solomon took his fifth-grade history class, myself included, to the Fleischmanns’ movie theatre for a special screening of GWTW, but after that, I was a goner. Wow. What a presence. That smile. That voice. That bad boy insouciance. That laugh. I was ten, and it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I put it together he’d been dead practically since I was born, but whatever, who cares, he’s alive to me! A solid decade before cable TV got to the farm, and given we got one channel, and lousy reception of one other, it was tough getting to see his films, but I tracked them down, watching them alone in the living room at midnight on a Friday with the sound turned way down, or at nine a.m. on a Tuesday morning in the middle of summer. I sussed the days and times when his movies would be on in the Sunday Press outlining that week’s line-up, and ticked off my list of ‘have seens’ with glee.
Gable. Hey, everyone has got to have a hobby. Mine was enjoying the living hell out of this classic film actor, and old movies, especially 1930s black and white pre-code specials, which are among the best written, funniest, most female-centric films ever made by the glitter machine. I thank the movies lovers who, before me, preserved these gems, running movie houses in New York City, where I spent many afternoons and evenings indulging in big screen showings of the best classic films ever made and even some not so classic films, which provided great context and content for this wee movie nerd.A Free Soul, which truly put Gable on the map in 1931, is so over the top melodramatic, it’s hilarious – yet, the film manages to be deeply moving as well, with a final courtroom scene that is a real corker, featuring Lionel Barrymore, who stars along with Gable, Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, and the marvelous character actor James Gleason (no relation to Jackie, Boomers). Oh, to return to fast-paced pre-code-style films, featuring a ton of character actors, including actual old and imperfect looking real folks, and a lot of them, with women’s stories front and center. The code I refer to is the Hays Code, which censored film content from 1934 – 1967, although its power waned with the rise of Television in the mid-fifties, upending the old established order. By the late fifties a tsunami of new wave films began arriving from Europe, making headlines as well as money; young American filmmakers didn’t give a shit about rules that were, essentially, unenforceable except by outdated agreement, agreements that didn’t fly during a decade of cultural upheaval and change.
The other problem with the Hays Code was that it’s petty nonsense negated and suppressed the necessary and real messiness of humanity; the code spelled death to nuance, complexity, depth, and the stories of those who were on the margins of power; it suppressed risk, and daring, limiting the possibilities of art and of story. What it changed in film from the late 30s to the 50s was a gradual and finally overwhelming decentering of women’s lives and stories, favoring male-centric stories because they were less likely to be ‘messy’. When you forbid mentions, depictions, and references to sex, sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth, including filmed photography of pregnant women at any stage of pregnancy, literally erasing multiple female story-lines, you will inevitably decenter women, and girls. I also think it’s not an accident that the 50s and 60s saw more than one closeted gay male actor emerge as a major sex symbol in Hollywood (Hudson, Hunter, Clift, Perkins, etc.), the film business execs subconsciously keeping their heroines pure (your swooning fan-girl wives and daughters too), by pairing them up on screen with men who prefer to sleep with men, even if it’s never openly acknowledged, and certainly isn’t in any script. Clark Gable, by then doing relatively neutered versions of his former performances also thanks to Hays, was still never an entirely safe suitor, and wasn’t that a big part of the fun? The introductory sequence of Rhett Butler’s character in GWTW is a study in the power of innuendo, and Gable’s reputation on screen to that point; no wonder this little chickadee was instantly lost in a crush. And, it managed to get around the Hays Code, even if Joe Breen and his co-censor/co-creeps tried to get the iconic line “Frankly my, dear, I don’t give a damn” taken out of the film because damn was a banned word (yes, really, see a truncated list of that and more below). That line stayed in because producer David Selznick appealed the ban, and use of the word ‘damn’, to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributor’s Board, and won. Thank goodness for that. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a hoot.” “Frankly my dear, I don’t care.” “Frankly my dear, I am unmoved.” “Frankly my dear, I’m outta here?” Unthinkable. And not what Margaret Mitchell wrote (although Gable and the screenwriters added frankly).
Just for shit and giggles, from a long, long list of no-nos, here’s the highlights of what the Hays Code didn’t want to see or hear on the screen (my editorial comments are italicized, their un-ironic additions are not): profanity including the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ (unless they’re used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd, and every other profane and vulgar expression however it may be spelled; any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette; scenes of actual childbirth—in fact or in silhouette; ridicule of the clergy; willful offense to any nation, race or creed (but also, unironically, they banned depictions of ‘miscegenation’). And, piling on, the Hays Code urged filmmakers and producers to be cautious regarding the use or depictions ofThe Flag; brutality and possible gruesomeness; techniques of committing murder by whatever method; methods of smuggling; sympathy for criminals; attitude toward public characters and institutions(what the hell does that mean?!); men and women in bed together (lolol, yes we wouldn’t want that!); the institution of marriage (that sacred institution, c’mon dudes, and it was mostly dudes, Catholic dudes, making this shit up); surgical operations; excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a “heavy” (a.k.a. a criminal type, you Philistines).
Gable, Gable, Gable, Gable, Gable.
More on the Hays Code generally, as well as GWTW’s specific struggles with it:
If everyone – every U.S. citizen, I mean – waited on tables for six months, minimum, I think the people in this country would be in a better place, be more grateful, for example. If everyone spent six months or a year working in a nursing home, in a pre-school or grade school, maybe, just maybe, we’d see people change their opinions and choices around life, death, and everything in-between, including exercise, diet, smoking, hospice care and euthanasia, as well as contraception and abortion. Maybe. It could happen, and regardless it wouldn’t hurt. If everyone in the U.S. chambermaid-ed (a word that is gendered, and therefore suspect right out of the gate) for two summers during a good old-fashioned tourist season in a hot or even just slightly warm spot (the spot I did it in was tepid, at best), I believe the world would also be improved. It suddenly occurs to me that in both seasons of White Lotus, we don’t see that segment of the help, the invisible chambermaids who clean up the messes in bathroom and bedroom, make the beds, change the sheets and towels weekly or daily, empty the trash cans, and pick up room service trays – all for minimum wage, and tips! And for tips, if they’re lucky. Hm. Those invisible, essential workers, invariably women.
Yes. Yes, I did. I waited tables on and off for almost a decade, and chambermaid-ed for two whole summers and a part of another, before and between my years of college, and yes, both of these jobs were also an education. Did it make me a better human per my opening statement? I think so. I like to think so, anyway, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Substitute teaching is another job everyone would benefit from doing – especially those who criticize teachers and like to talk about those ‘long summers off’. As far as I could tell during my seven years filling various positions at the local K-12, those long ‘free as a bird’ summers are only long if you’re a parent waiting impatiently for school to start again. I did that too, I substitute taught, and my respect for teachers took a lovely leap upward, although they were already high, with a few individual exceptions. Just as in every profession, I encountered a handful of people in the education business who had zero business being there. Ah, humanity. So sublime, and so horrid. And, everything in-between.
I stopped having waitressing nightmares only a handful of years ago after thirty-plus years of having quit that biz, the anxiety of too many tables, endless demand, not enough servers and customers who were demanding and selfish bubbling up in my consciousness. Caffé Pertutti. Hanratty’s. West Side Story. Arno’s. Big Nick’s. Shakespeare’s Tavern and Playhouse. When I finally decided never again, never, ever again would I do that, wait tables for a living, I stuck to it. I was twenty-eight, and never will I ever not be grateful for the women and even a few men I met and befriended during those days, but never will I ever cease wondering at the vagaries of people (the customers) and their food. Good lord. What a lesson in humanity, and everyone would benefit from that, eh? Whatever happened to Segundo, I wonder, my favorite ever busboy, a real gentleman, such a hard worker, and so sweet. Never did he ever hit on me or make crude gestures as we passed, never did he ever show resentment toward me for being both a lot taller than he was, and speaking English better. Hell, he spoke English and Spanish, so of the two of us, he was the more linguistically gifted. What a mensch. Segundo for the second of his mother’s sons. Working with people whose backgrounds are very different from ours is a very good thing, and the restaurant industry is chock full of that mind and heart-broadening opportunity.
Helping out in my dad’s store, as a kid, was also an education; I learned that rubbers were not only rainy-day foot wear, for example. I knew we had Dr. Scholl’s sandals, which of course I loved (red leather straps, always), but rubbers? ‘I don’t think so. You could maybe try the department store across the street. Hold on,’ I shouted, ‘Dad! Do we have rubbers?!’ My dad, helping someone else, rolled his eyes, laughing, and came right over. We did, it turns out, have rubbers, stowed behind the door of the back room, where many odd, mysterious and even dangerous things were kept. My dad took the blushing twenty-something man in his capable and compassionate hands, leading him to where he was able to discreetly make his choice of a product very much not in the footwear line. Oops.
Observing people, many people, people I knew in our small town, beg, plead, cajole and even vaguely threaten my dad to refill their prescriptions days or weeks or months ahead of schedule, was an education of a whole other kind. It made me certain I would never, ever do drugs, ever – and would do my damnedest to avoid ever taking prescription drugs. Okay, well, I did do recreational drugs, in college mainly, and might’ve done more, but as a pharmacist’s daughter, there was something I objected to in having to pay for it. Pay for it? Hell no. And while it was clear that there were others ways I could have access to drugs as a comely young thing, that wasn’t ever gonna happen either. Hell no. It was fun while it lasted, I’m glad I had those experiences, and thankful I had zero addictive inclinations, but no.
Oby Atkin (Obediah, I guess?), who owned an antique store in town, came in every other Saturday or Sunday when I was a teenager and bought a hundred or two-hundred dollars’ worth of porn magazines. I always felt embarrassed and awkward when I ran into his wife in town, but she didn’t seem to get out much. Doc Ferraro, the dentist, wrote script after script for his much younger wife, tried to charm me, and my dad, distracting us with banter while scratching his Rx pad. And he was charming, but everyone in town knew something was off, especially after his wife drove into a friend’s house one night. I don’t mean drove into their driveway, I mean she drove into the actual front of the house, crash, bang, boom, so they had to get a new porch and front door. You see a lot, know a lot, living in a small town, serving John and Jane Q. Public over the years. And, no matter what, my dad was discreet; he might hear the gossip, be told people’s secrets in that same backroom, but he didn’t share, ever, even about those calls, the ones that came in late at night because someone he’d known his whole life had swallowed a bottle of pills, drunk a fifth of scotch, and reached out to him because they’d changed their minds, and knew Dick wouldn’t judge, would only help, which he did.
My last waitressing job was at a schmancy steak house on the lower west side. I can never remember the name of the place, which is indicative of how much I hated it there. The customers were Gordon Gecko wanna-bes who treated the wait staff horribly or with a niceness that stunk of noblesse oblige, all of it depending on how the markets had been that day or week, bullish to bearish. The brothers who owned the place were very different, as in one was mostly absent and nice when present, and the other was ever present and presented as what he was: a short, fat hateful pig. He liked to humiliate the old guy waiters, especially in front of younger female employees like me. It clearly got him off, screaming at sixty and seventy-year old men, immigrants who need the work, and who as union members were within several months or years of being able to retire after decades on their feet, having built new lives in America. He’d shoot me sidelong glances as he strutted his stuff in the kitchen, having said his worst to these men, men who were always kind to me, the new kid on the block. What a schmuck. At that job, if you weren’t busy, you were required to stand with your back up against the wall, hands behind your back. This little shit of a human being, who was several inches shorter than I was, liked to push his belly and pelvis up against me as I stood there motionless, and – if not helpless – stuck for the moment, peering over his head. Oh, how I would love to rip the smirk off his face for all the young women I’m sure he did that to, over the years. Maybe I could send a copy of this to him? I do remember his name, if not the name of the restaurant. Yick.
Two full seasons of chambermaiding at the Mathes Hotel in Fleischmanns, New York, May – September rounded out my time making up beds and cleaning up after strangers. It was an early twentieth century hotel that had been updated in ‘50s and neglected ever since. My days there were in the late seventies. The Mathes was closed all winter, spring and fall, had minimal maintenance on a daily or annual basis, with entire facilities and wings shut down because the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Mathes, didn’t have or didn’t want to spend the money to get them up on running, or to make needed repairs. It was a strange place, faded and hollow, filled with returning long-time customers who were, like the Hotel itself, on their last legs. Both my younger sister and I had residents die on us that first summer, as in we were the ones who discovered their bodies in their rooms when we went in to clean. Then, after reporting the unsettling news, Mrs. Mathes shooed us away, bustling in to go through the individual’s personal effects. The woman whose cabin-ette I cleaned, the one who I discovered dead in her bed, was shipped back to New York City or New Jersey with all arrangements made by Mrs. Mathes. No one in her family bothered to make the trip, which seem hard, and tragic. She had always tipped me well, and was palpably, painfully lonely. I had made conversation with her, but I was on the clock and Mrs. M didn’t like us to dawdle, ever.
Twice that summer Mr. Mathes cornered me, or tried to, in the upstairs hallway, attempting to cop a feel. He had to have been in his sixties or seventies. I was eighteen. I told Mrs. Mathes after his second attempt, and she looked at me for a long moment, silently, finally telling me to get back to work. He was easy to outrun, so I let it go, and he never tried it again so maybe she said something to him? Mrs. Mathes was short and stout and efficient. They accepted cash only, and it was clear she was the one in charge of the money and reservations, the business side. It appeared to me that she and the Mister were fading away in concert with friends, albeit paying friends, all together in that place where, twenty and thirty years prior, they’d had experienced real enjoyment after the war. Many of them lost family in the Holocaust, but Mrs. Mathes didn’t talk about the past, none of the guests did either, at least not to me.
Cleaning is simply not that much fun, in my opinion, except the part where you’re done and it looks great and feels like an accomplishment. And, chambermaiding was – not too awful, just not a job you want, long-term. Nice to be done by 11a.m. most days, not nice to find dead people, nice to get decent tips occasionally and not nice to clean up other people’s messes. The Mathes Hotel had a cook who firmly believed in a daily dose of stewed prunes with breakfast, and that created problems for us, the cleaner-uppers, more than once. I remember standing on the front lawn as I crossed from the laundry back toward the hotel proper, watching almost as if in slow motion as a poor man tried his best to get down the long front porch and inside to the bathroom before crapping in his pants, and on the floor. He got about half-way. I begged and pleaded with my sister to clean it up, and in exchange I did the room on the 2nd floor, the one with the woman who had regular problems of a related kind, but I’m pretty sure my sister got the short end of the stick. I was just happy we made it through that summer without any more deaths.
Maybe the real lesson of all the different jobs I had, waiting table, clerking for my dad, chambermaiding, was to see humanity at its best and worst and everywhere in-between, to prepare me for life out in the world, outside my fan-dam-ly. I was also able to see who and what I didn’t want to be, or how I didn’t want to be. I already knew I never wanted to make people feel like shit, although life has taught me that is almost inevitable, because there are those who already feel like it, are constantly look for confirmation, and are impossible to avoid. I knew I didn’t want my dad’s business, or job (neither did he, as it happened), or my mom’s, as a teacher. I didn’t want to wait tables or open a restaurant, own a hotel or manage one. I also didn’t want to manage a disco or move up through the ranks at any of the many places I worked as a teen and twenty-something, including a stint at the MTA as an information operator, one of those people attached to a phone headset who gave out train information, now, I believe, all automated. What a dead-end that was, for me. For me. Not for others, who had and have different needs and ambitions.
If you have talent or talents, and intelligence, drive and desire, and are interested in many things the possibilities are – potentially – endless. I once loved a very handsome man who told me his life was largely defined by all the women, and men, he’d said ‘no’ to, and it’s like that, in a way (he really was so, so gorgeous). But – it’s getting to yes that matters, getting to yes and a place of purpose and meaning – if you’re lucky, that is, and don’t have to make a living right now to feed kids or whatever meter is ticking regardless of ‘purpose’, or doing something that is deemed a contribution to society. All work is a contribution of some kind or another, even if it’s solely about putting food on a plate, yours or the plate of someone you love.
Maybe none of these jobs made me a better person, a better citizen, after all, but they did allow me time and experiences I would not have had otherwise, time to grow up and find out what I wanted to do, which ultimately was rather simple and, wonder of wonders, right back where I started as a child. Why is it the simplest answers so often elude us? Not that I didn’t know what I wanted, I just wasn’t sure how to get back there, get back there through the maze of expectation and projection, safe, sound and solvent, never having once again to wait tables or do any job that was a test of endurance and generosity of spirit. And what I wanted, all along? To read, write, talk to and be with friends, grow shit, watch good content, and absorb all the political news I can stomach. That’s it. And speaking of stomachs, I also wanted to eat good food cooked by myself, and, on occasion, by others (bless them), served by others (ohmigawd, thank you, and may your waitressing nightmares be few), paid for by me without a scintilla of financial agita, including a nice fat tip. Simple pimple.
*Lloyd Dobler, from the great flick, Say Anything, written by Cameron Crowe
Today’s rain in the Catskills is very much welcome, not only because we collectively need it – our hay and corn fields and every other living thing – but because I personally need a slow day wherein my compulsivity doesn’t kick in, putting me out there (over)doing thangs when my muscles are already complaining, and rightly so.
And so, while I allow for a little recovery, a few choice quotes shared below to start a day of rest, plenty of deep breaths, no noticing of what all needs a good clean hereabouts (a lot) as that can wait for another day this week, or next! A rainy day in spring is a gift, a gift allowing time for focusing on writing, writing, and more writing.
Gloria Steinem, 1970, testifying before congress re: the ERA, which we still ain’t got, daggnabbit, “The truth is that all our problems stem from the same sex-based myths. We may appear before you as white radicals or the middle-aged middle class or black soul sisters, but we are all sisters in fighting against these outdated myths. Like racial myths, they have been reflected in our laws.”
Carl Jung: “Life really does begin at forty, until then you are just doing research. And if an attractive woman is single, it’s because she’s smarter than everyone else thought.” (no comment other than LOLOLOL)
Tennessee Williams: “All the qualities of magic reside in women. This is why the fearful suppress them. This is why the wise follow them.”
Annie Ernaux: “The general belief is that one cannot go anywhere that is not familiar; people feel genuine admiration for those who aren’t afraid of going places.”
Vaclav Havel: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure everything ends badly. Instead, I am a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning—and that liberty is worth the trouble.”
M. Scott Peck: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
Herman Hesse: “We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome… We are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
Charlotte Brontë: “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
Jim Ralston: “The highest meaning of the social group is to foster the development of individual potential, for the community’s own well-being depends on it. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline. The very best citizens have also been the most evolved individuals. Groups, nations, classes, clans, and families tend toward narrowness, meanness toward other groups, nations, etc. It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. It is always the community that is ready to stone the witch.”
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: “You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”
Agnes Hobbs: “You can close the windows and darken your room, and you can open the windows and let light in . . .It is a matter of choice. Your mind is your room. Do you darken it or do you fill it with light?”
Thich Nhat Hanh: “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
T.S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Roman Payne: The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, ‘I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God.’”
Sandra Cisneros: “I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear—and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me.”
Have a great day, y’all. I hope you found inspiration, as I have, in the above quotes from all sorts of peeps, and thanks for visiting.
*not a horror film duckies, just normal, annual clean-up craziness for April in the Catskills.
Today I will be working outside with my branch lopper, and my chainsaw, both of which are run by battery, which batteries are charging ‘as we speak’, and omg, if you’ve never used a chainsaw, it’s so so so much fun, and I highly recommend it ~ especially if you’re in a lousy, I want to break shit mood. And, of course, safety comes first. If you’re right-handed, keep that left arm stiff while operating the saw, vicey-versy if you’re left-handed you need to keep the right arm stiff as a board, wear protective goggles, do NOT bite off more than you can chew (egos in check, always, when operating any shit that can cut your fingers and other extremities off, keeping in mind that it takes only 2 – 5 minutesto bleed out a.k.a. die, corpse up, kick the bucket if an artery is hit), wear glovies, and avoid pants that have a lot of fabric like bell-bottoms or extree doo-dads hanging off that could get caught in the chain, and long sleeved shirts are best too, also worn tight to the body as again no extree fabric to get caught up. A hat is good too – the number of branches I’ve lopped off at the proper angle to drop just so over thattaway that have instead landed thissaway and on my noggin is more than a few (ouch).
I am doing April clean-up outside; it’s the spring month when it’s not too hot for me to be doing tree work that is hard, exhausting, and deeply rewarding as well as long overdue on a property that’s been in my family for over a century, but which has been in my hands – after six decades as a rental – for just four years. Once the house where lived, in my grandparent’s day, the hired hands for the family farm, the inside needed so much work, 98% done, I didn’t get a lot accomplished outside until last year, but now my full attention has turned to the property surrounding the house. I do what I can (not a whole lot, TBH, but some) with dead or struggling saplings, and with the removal of dead branches, and the numerous stinky whatever bush/trees no one seems to know the name of; these suckers flower but are the main head bashing criminals, growing up like a twisted rope of a mess that challenges me to my stubborn core, and yes, they stink when cut. They are mainly on the edges of the property, along stone walls I have begun to restore, proliferating during an age of neglect in what once was a corn or hay field depending on the year.
Everything hurts. Including my eyelashes.
A slight exaggeration. But, chainsawing saplings, and dragging them along with dead or live tree branches – even just the medium and small ones – is a lot and, it really is so much fun, it makes me smile just typing it out. I write this instead of finishing a piece on gender and sexuality because that subject is so broad, so deep, and so in need of concentration, I worry I’m too exhausted to do it justice even in this short form. I practically can’t move, and ~ I’m heading back out there shortly once the batteries are all charged up, because despite the fact that a dear friend of mine is horrified/thrilled I use a chainsaw at all, I know like I know like I know that, girl, it’s fun. And, if I do an hour or two or three a day, every April day, it’ll get done. Vroom, vroom!!
As I am continually reminded of that other Marjorie, the one from Georgia, let me in part attempt to redeem my first name (albeit with a slightly different spelling!) with the quote above, of Marjory Stonemason Douglas. Just over 5 years ago, her namesake school in Florida was the site of yet another school shooting. Last week, a school in Tennessee was the site of yet another one, and this week – two days ago – there was a mass shooting at a bank in Kentucky, a state – like Tennessee and Florida – that is very gun friendly, and that ranks 13th out of 50 states nationwide in deaths from gun violence per the CDC.
I am numb to it all, yet – still I rage against gun huggers and their enablers in various governmental bodies across this country. And, I will do a dance of joy if and when (knock wood) the NRA is forever bankrupt and destroyed. I also live in a rural part of New York State where I was roundly criticized for, while acting a county legislator, not voting to condemn the NY Safe Act, a law that was passed in the dark shadow of the Newtown Ct. murders of 26 children and adults, twenty of them first graders. First graders.
Thoughts and prayers aren’t working. Banning assault weapons, weapons of war, does. The U.K. suffered one – one – mass shooting in an elementary school in Dunblaine, Scotland, in 1996 and as a result changed their firearms laws. Since then – crickets. It makes me ashamed to be an American, watching legislators prioritize guns over the lives of children, of adults, of all of us. Where next? Grocery stores, movie theaters, synagogues, churches, schools, concerts, dance studios, yoga classes have all been visited with mass murder, rendering them at least in part unsafe ~ where will we be slaughtered next because the selfish, stupid armed minority have bullied the majority of us into a state of resignation?
Charlie Sykes is a conservative pro-lifer whose anti-fascist, anti-trump podcast, The Bulwark, I occasionally listen to because while a number of his positions make me wanna scream and beat him over the head with a styrofoam donkey, it’s important to me to break my bubble with the views of others (and, he’s left the GOP, good choice, Charlie!). Plus, I am a big fan of Tim MIller whose 2022 book was an excellent autopsy of the road to the transformation of the Grand Ol’ Party into the GQP/Trmp party. Plus, he’s funny. But, back to Sykes. He recently penned the following, which I share here because he is 100% correct; if these mass killings were carried out by ISIS, imagine how quickly we would act. Instead, our mind-numbing almost daily rate of domestic terror attacks barely make an impression. Shameful. ‘Murica! We can and must do better. If I were growing up now, and saw shooting after shooting after shooting as well as how intransigent legislators were regarding gun safety laws, I wold be terrified, confused, and enraged, certain that the people in charge – the supposed adults in the room – were saying, to me and my peers, you all don’t matter. Guns matter. Sorry, kids!
The quote from Sykes’ newsletter, and good food for thought:
Instead of talking about the routine slaughter of children and our fellow citizens in schools, banks, nightclubs, and grocery stores, imagine we were talking about terrorist attacks. Imagine that there had been 145 attacks from members of the Sinaloa Cartel, or that dozens of airplanes had been hijacked and hundreds of passengers killed. Would Rick Scott merely offer thoughts and prayers? Would Ted Cruz suggest that we need more locked doors? Armored backpacks? More armed guards? More bans on drag queen story hours?
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself. – Maya Angelou
N.B.: I started this piece inway back 2004, when I put my mother in a nursing home,working on it for the following 4 years until her death in 2007,and it’s a hot mess, but! here we are, and to quote Cheryl Strayed among others, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’. Ironically or how perfectly perfect is the fact that I do, now, have an IRA – I inherited it from my dad, my pater.
Every time my brother asks me if I’ve made an annual contribution to my IRA, I choke with laughter as well as frustrated anger and incredulity. Who the hell does he think I am, anyway, does he not know me, my life circumstances, at all? Is he clueless, or just sweetly complacent in his own settled, deeply conventional, and financially comfortable life? Have I failed so completely in communicating to my brother the very real challenges, financial and otherwise, I have faced over the last twenty-plus years out in the world on my own? Or, perhaps, it’s a combination of all of the above.
The first time I heard the term IRA I thought the speaker was talking about the Irish Republican Army and later, once I got they were actually talking banking, I figured it was a kind of savings account established to pay off the IRS or maybe a weird Irish charity, close to my original thought. Yet now when my brother asks me about “my IRA”, I merely smile tightly and say “Of course”. I mean what the what? It easier by far for me to discuss who I’m fucking, but don’t you dare ask me about money, bro. But here’s my real answer: I don’t have an IRA. Why would I have an IRA? Who do you think I am that I would be socking away money in an IRA, whatever the hell IRA really means as I refuse to look it up, or read the fliers at my bank? I don’t plan for the future; I’ve never planned for the future because until relatively recently I didn’t plan on having one. I mean, what’s the point of saving for your retirement or your eightieth birthday (that is the basic idea, right?) if you’re not going to live to have either one, you get my drift?
So here I am, in my mid-forties, not knowing really how I managed to make it here alive (luck, endurance, humor), completely baffled by tax exemptions, tax shelters, and IRAs, not to mention health insurance, retirement planning, stocks, bonds, and social security issues, all of which I gather are real things, good things? Important, even? Oh, and let’s not forget the most baffling and complicated thing of all: the grim specter of aging itself. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with that one, ever.
I’ve been thinking about killing myself since I was fourteen or to be honest, for as long as I can remember, since early childhood, and while it’s obvious I never did it there were days I came as close to it as a fat man’s right thigh is to his left on a hot, humid day waiting for the subway after a long slow hard climb down multiple flights of steep concrete stairs to a platform that reeks of piss, sweat and rat shit. That close, that rubbed raw, that clammy, and that much in pain, that aware of the edge of the platform. Other days (happier ones?) I merely let the mantra of my childhood roar through my brain as if it were the passing train itself (I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead), and I the fat man watching it go by without leaping in front of it. Its passage, the endless, roaring train, leaves me on the platform wilted, defeated, hopeless in the airless and dripping, stinking heat, alone with my too large, stuffed with emotion, body full of pain (I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead).
And it’s odd but, that thought – like the sound of my own heartbeat it was so familiar a voice in my head, day after day, year after year – no longer even enters my brain. Okay, okay, not nearly as often, as I want us to be honest, for once, with one another, shall we? Not nearly as often. Have I been saved by love, by Jesus, by Gaia? None of the above – and not by therapy or travel or spontaneous combustion, either. Time, persistence, intelligence (keep guns out of the house, don’t go to doctors, thereby restricting access to any prescription drugs), eccentricity (ten years a macrobiotic vegetarian, walking on the shady side of every street in NYC to avoid skin cancer, among other weird-ass choices), exercising daily like a mother-fucker if and only if – it comes and goes in waves – despair hasn’t suceeded in shutting me down, sending me back to bed, and, finally, more than anything a sense of humor, admittedly a very dark sense of humor, has kept me alive. Hallelujah, amen, praise whoever! I do believe that laughter is the cure!
Once (only once? many, many times) when I was very, very deeply into a long period of suicidal ideation – ideation, ideation, what a word – I was asked, “Have you had moments of suicidal ideation?” This was long ago by one of several relatively ineffectual therapists. Suidical ideation?Suicidal ideation? Hello – are you asking me if I have thought of killing myself as well as a way to do it? When have I not is more to the point, and by the way, if that’s what you’re asking, then say so bitch.
But, of course I didn’t say that, instead I lied through my teeth, parsing the word she used, breaking it down, always the language teacher’s daughter. Ideation, ideation – idea and creation. But the answer is no, it’s no – which lie may explain why she, and a flock of other therapists, were so ineffectual. Jesus H. Christ – do you really expect me to honestly tell you that?Admit that out loud, like a bubble of dialogue in the air we both breathe? No. Not gonna happen. Ask me about my sex life instead, okay? Another disaster but hell yeah, a lot more interesting. And I can make jokes about that. Easy peasy. Let’s keep it light. Ask me about money, and we can talk in generalities, as in I have none, which you know because I am only here by the grace of the sliding scale, and your status as a cheap-ass trainee therapist. But that’s it. Admit I am suicidal, on a daily basis? Never. That’s not how I get through.
Humor. Humor is how I survive. And so, there I was, not for the first time by far, in a deep, deep funk, deep funk, Barry White’s basso profundo couldn’t be more funky than I was that particular day into night, alone in my apartment (when have I not been alone, hello!?). I was hitting myself (I don’t recommend this, not very fun, or particularly effective) crying, sobbing unable to stop, crying jag is the term, I believe, hitting bottom again, again, again, finding new places to dig and this hole I’d found was so deep and I was so committed to it (also not recommended, though in general I do believe commitment to one’s goals is a good thing), digging as far as the darkness inside and all around me would allow – but no drugs or alcohol in me, I swear, because in my personal very screwy belief system, suicide is a chicken shit way out, a mistake, and a bad, wrong choice if you’re high or drunk or strung out. Conversely, committing self-murder is a brave, very brave, and even noble choice if, if, you’re dry, un-high and simply, understandably, natually at your real true honest to goodness organically achieved and completely drug or substance-free end of the fucking rope. Forgetting, conveniently, that brain chemistry, emotions, and thoughts are in themselves a kind of drug. Whatever. So there I was hitting the bottom of the half-empty (always half-empty, never half full) barrel, scraping it with my fingernails while the central theme of my life yet again kept me pressed under the dirty bilge water of my own desire for self-destruction for the umpteenth time: “You are not wanted here. Nobody wants you; you are not loved. You will never be loved or experience love. You will always, always be alone. Life is pain, life has always been pain. How much longer can you do this? How much longer should you do this? Why are you doing this? Wouldn’t it be better, much better, to end this unbearable pain?”
And in that room that night where I was hitting myself and crying and trying very hard to resist banging my head against the wall (I didn’t want to disturb the neighbors) trying to figure out how I would kill myself this time (pills, when I was a kid, my mother’s shelf full of them: Fiorinal, Demerol, Percocet, Valium, Darvon, Tylenol with codeine) and wanting very much to do it right, get it done, which meant slashing my wrists in the tub while running water helped draw the blood out and down the drain, except I couldn’t get past what a waste of water that would be, because it could be, probably is, from my childhood home in the Catskills. And I can’t wake the neighbors by shooting msyelf with a gun I don’t even own! I can’t be a bother – to EMS or EMTs, the cops, whoever might respond, because that’s thoughtless, a problem (more of one than I am already!), as well as a waste of resources not to mention of space (unloved, unlovable!). Jesus H. Christ no wonder I wanted to off myself! But then in the midst of beating myself and crying and generally wailing (quietly, quietly, remember the neighbors!) I found myself on the floor of my bedroom, with a heavy electrical cord in my hand. This, this will work! I can tie this strong cord around my neck and leverage myself into a strangulation configuration with the iron rail of my bedstead and somehow – wait – what does this cord go to anyway, this oddly heavy cord?? Is this to my lamp, because I don’t remember it being this heavy? It’s not an extension cord is it? I followed it with my eyes, and then my hands, as it was very dark, 3a.m., to its conclusion. Aha! My vibrator. My vibrator. Even I, at my very worst and lowest, couldn’t kill myself with the cord of my vibrator. My vibrator. I laughed so hard I stopped – I finally, actually stopped – crying. And so, once again, I was saved by laughter.
I got up off that floor and sat on the side of my bed, laughing so hard, laughing more and more, escaping – evicting – my despair as, for a moment, I imagined the pot-bellied cop or wasted, wired EMT picking the cord up and away from my neck, following it to the same conclusion: laughter, incredulity, sharing it with the rest of the crew to general hilarity, a lightening of whatever mood my corpse had crushed. And of course it would have come on somewhere within my death throes – slightly thrumming still, bbbzzzzzzzzzzzz, bbbzzzzzzzzz, sending my final Con Ed bill sky high – another thing for my dad to freak out over, covering his actual emotion, ‘Goddamned kid can’t even shut the appliances off; doesn’t she know this is why we’re dependent on foreign oil?!’
I crouch and cower, still, in the shadow of the preoccupations my parents, depression-era babies, shoved at me, preoccupations tightly wound together with the baby-boomer’s so-called sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s: don’t you forget to turn off the lights in a room when you leave it and don’t you dare screw around like those awful kids a generation older than yourself. Fuck all you baby-boomers anyway, the selfish generation, we younger tween gens follow in your entrails, we wade through the shit you leave behind, you self-absorbed, narcissistic assholes, waiting with anticipatory glee for the day when you are all incapacitated, drooling, demented, wallowing in your own excrement in a nursing home where the orderlies (social security and Medicaid were killed by the excesses of your generation, thanks!!) are paid very little and therefore do very little. Oh and by the way, you raised your kids to be selfish spoilt little shits, just like your goddamned selves; they never visit.
Why do I say such things? Why do I think such things? I am such a bad person (I once would have thought); I should kill myself (I once would have concluded). Simply debating myself over life and death, playing whack-a-mole with my mantra, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, debating every single day between good (deserves to live) and bad (evil bad sinful hell-bound no reason to live) me, was exhausting, and death was where I would find rest, blessed rest.
In grade school I stepped on every crack, every day on the way home and yet still, there she’d be – mother – waiting to mete out tonight’s cruelties or, schizophrenic, momentary fondness, depending on her mood and in what way she imagined daddy had betrayed or ignored her and favored me that day, that week, me being the chosen extension and reflection of his wrongs, and her competition for his affection. Why did she have to pick me, why say he loves me more than you, mother, and has from the moment I was born, why make me your rival and enemy, why me? Why do you tell me I will one day sleep with my own father when I am just nine and ten and twelve years old, taking your place in the ‘marriage bed’? Why? Stupid unanswerable questions – but perhaps just as simple as the mountain being climbed: because it’s there, asshole, thus, because you were there. And although a piece of my unformed child’s brain knows it’s not me, the real me deep down inside, who she designates as her cross to bear, the ruination of her life, the mistake, the unwanted child, still, I live through it and yes, I take it personally as in I take it into my person. I take it into my person. And for this and for other reasons I begin to want to die – to make her better, to make it better. I am four, five and six years old and I fear my mother and her hatred of me. I crave her love. I crave her approval, the imprimatur of her positive attention, giving me permission to write my story in something other than my own blood, draining away.
I fantasize winning a prize big enough to win her over, to transform her view of me to that of my older sister, golden child (married to the Doctor’s son), or older brother, the son and heir (the one with the IRAs, the stocks and bonds), or younger sister, the baby, the pet, the savior (thank you Jay-sus, no more kids after that one, just a yes, please, free me now, free at last, blessed hysterectomy). I fantasize multiple scenarios and various schemes in which magically my secret and secretly damaged self will be transformed into loveable, undamaged, pure. Loved. Wanted.
But. In all my years of excellence in school, in sports, in band, chorus, drama club, Honor Society, Cheerleading, audio visual club – you name it – all that excellence, an excellence she found baffling, I could never do it, never win her love, her approval. And there were things that happened, to me, as a child – not your fault mother, but I feared that if I said anything, showed any vulnerability – no. I can’t. Secrets. Toxicity. More to hide, more to hate.
Turns out she knew, at least about some of it. Sexual abuse at the hospital by person or persons unknown, when I was there alone, eighteen months old, sick with pneumonia. My mother was home recovering from her hysterectomy, with a 6 week-old baby, as well as her 4 and 5 year old children to look after. My dad was working seven days a week, but came to spend the nights in the hospital with me, but not the days, not the evenings. They had a woman, a nurse’s aide, helping at our house on Main Steet, Nancy A., who stayed with my mom overnight, and during the day, but she had a young family, too. The family doctor had always been worried about me, he said, the summer after my mother died, because even as young as I was, even though they all believed I was too young to remember the act, the acts, my mother seemed to believe it was my fault. Mom. Some random person (staff? fellow patient?) inserting self or sticking things (a constant nightmare of my childhood, reliving what was unpronouncable) into her 18-month old’s vagina.
As a teenager I began to hate my mother as much as I hated myself, always, always, however, with my eye on her, waiting for some sign that I was really ok, that this had just been a test of my resolve, and of my character. She always said suffering was good for the soul, my tarnished Catholic soul. Maybe she was just playing with me.
Here is my IRA, brother, on this page. Here I will deposit my truths and record my losses, which are many. Here too I will record a number of gains, among them the saving of my own life. Because you told me I was worthless, mother, and a mistake, I made mistakes, accepted less than I was worth. Because you told me I would never marry, mother, I didn’t, although I could have, many times. Defiance works in weird ways, when you are as twisted as I made myself for you, as I made myself to hide myself, who I was, from you, from others, from myself. Because you told me I would never have a child, I didn’t, yet more than you saying that, I am okay with childlessness because I knew I didn’t want to do to a child what you did to me. I would not bring life forth while I was white knuckling my own. Because you told me I would never find a man who would love me, that I was wrong and bad and flawed – too strong for a man, too smart for a man, not beautiful like my sisters, too much, too much, too much, and all of it bad – I avoided intimacy and craved affirmation of all that was worthless in me, that which you called out, you, who knew me better than anyone else. Or so I used to believe.
Mother, mater, madre, maw, momma, mammacita. And more, those things large and small that happened to me that I never shared while you were alive, afraid it would only confirm and affirm what you thought about me, said about me, dirty bad horrid unnatural girl, my father’s second wife, his future lover.
Patrominy is what we inherit, including our names, from our fathers. Matrimony is marriage, the act of, the celebration of. How rich! I reclaim and define matrimony anew, as that which we inherit from our mothers, including the eggs all women, all girls, are born with; me a potential life as an egg inside her, and as a baby, she inside my grandmother. How crazy is that? Then my eggs, in me, when she gave me life. Her brilliance, her darkness, all mine, until I decide, I parse and choose, I let it go.
I saved and saved and saved images of my childhood and of you, mother, and of you, father, and of my siblings, and the things you said and I made myself survive on humor and the slim hope that one day it (me? life?) would get better and y’know what? It did. You slowly lost your mind, momster, and you lost your power, and I got clear, stronger, better; you lost your mind mother, and then you died, you died, and my life got a lot better. No self-death, no suicide, no train running me over – just you, made into ash, six feet under. I struggle with forgiving you every day. I struggle with forgiving myself for wasting so much of my life, and for denying myself love and the possibility of a family of my own for all these years, terrified someone would see in me what you saw, terrified I’d do to an innocent child what was done to me. Not just by you, but. By you, too, mother.
I struggle too with forgiving my brother for not having a clue about my life and me and what a world of difference there was in the way in which we were raised. He is a good man, I know this, and he won’t know what I won’t tell him. Will I tell him? All of it? Including the things, the events, the deaths in life, I haven’t even admitted to myself? How lucky he was, being born a boy. Yes, we all have our struggles, men and boys, women and girls, but some are challenged it seems merely by the choice of which well-lit, broad, and tree-lined street to walk down, while others are faced with having to walk down what turns out to be a very dark, narrow, and unsafe street, alone. No one ever said life was fair.
Dear brother, I thought about killing myself every day from the time I was fourteen (and earlier, much earlier, truthful, now, at last – from the time I was 6 and 7 and 8) until I was almost forty, and I struggle to let it go and have faith that all will be well and all will be very well. And it is a struggle, not every day, not all days, not even most days – nowadays. But there are times I have to hide and work hard to stay in the moment, letting go of the past, being thankful right here and now, even if I’ve lost sight of what there is to be thankful for, right here and now.
Surviving. I am grateful I survived my own idea creation, my ideation, of self-murder. I have saved myself, at least, even if I have no IRA, no savings, no 401k, no children of my own, no husband or ex-husband, no other long time up close (God no!) witness to the person that is me. I do have hope. I am being truthful, now, which means I may just finally move on, grow, surrender to curiousity and possibility. Let the past go. It’s over. Mother is dead. Anything is possible. Anything. Life itself. Love. Who knows?
“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”- Carl Jung
