Disclaimer: The following
is a dream of a time when the chess board was full, the horseman stood tall and
the king and queen reigned. When mamas and papas and uncles and aunts would
come to play for the holidays and when cousins would make believe and grandparents
would look the other way. Any representation of people or places is entirely
imaginary to the best of my memory of completely real people and places.
Probably Chapter 5, 7,
and 15, Not 1:
I have landed on an old
couch in not quite Manhattan, in Brooklyn, on the hottest day of the year.The dingy hand-me-down brownish checkered couch, once a prized find on the streets of Buschwick, probably swiped when someone was still moving out, or in, only adds to the my doubts for what is looking to be a very roughly planned decision. Wafts of
street trash and concrete heat fill the air in the big square loft. My cousin
is moving out of her McKibben
Street art dorm for greener pastures of a railroad
apartment in Williamsburg;
the trendy neighborhood. This is the chance of events I counted on when
homeless and facing craigslist roommates. The scene of the two big warehouses,
now McKibben street
lofts, in the early 2000s plays out like a Baz Lurmann musical. Everyday is a
Lurhmann Moulin Rouge or Great Gatsby film as legs dangle leisurely outside the
second story loft across the street, a hipster hangs a clarinet outside a rusty
loft window to serenade the blazing hot afternoon and a band begins practice in
the elevator shaft for an underground acoustic finale. You can see into each
and every large loft window on the opposing building and them into ours.
I am in New York City at
twenty-two, it is the rainiest fall I can ever recall and all of my sandals
with thongs have popped and all of my pants are sopped, but I am traveling
underground through time and space with James Frey and Dave Eggers and Joan
Didion doing careful character life studies, so I can begin to untangle my own
shaded history. I have mastered the L
train to Williamsburg
and Union Square
where I stop for internet, Whole Foods and Barnes and Noble. It is on these early
days of my life in New York
that I also stumble across Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris. In memoir,
unlike anything else at the time, I felt I could reside deeper in the undertows
of a person’s most intimate account of their personal experience. I walk past
the fiction, religion, non-fiction and Oprah’s top ten, but it is this section
of the big box bookstore I am infatuated with, and I attribute it to having
never had a mother to imprint on, never fully allowing a grandmother that
privilege, and having been orphaned by age sixteen.
My situation growing up
goes something like this, when the holidays came around, in the Chelsea house in the nice
neighborhood by the nice schools, we had a full house. My living with my
grandparents meant sharing a closet with cashmere, old polished shoes filled
with shoe horns and the fragrance of mothballs. I don’t suppose that my dad’s
parents had planned on raising an adult child, my dad, and then his child, me.
I was the rambunctious
little one growing up in basically a museum curated by a southern woman born in
the 1920s, a World War II veteran born in 1914 and their son Greg, my dad.
Every nook and cranny is filled with things. There were collections of
magazines, beer steins and dollhouses. There were collections of vintage
jewelry and old trunks, of purses and gloves and those were just in the house.
Follow a little pebbled road to a separate garage building where the curator, my
dad, housed his most proudest collections. There were two floors and within
those walls where the garage door never opened and the side door was always
locked, were cuckoo clocks, old dressers and lamps and chairs. Always a large
section devoted to Depression glass and a filing cabinet filled with tiny paper
scraps of expired coupons. And on the upstairs level where the old toys
were kept you could find your pick of toy trains, old iron banks and the most
valuable rare child sized automobile.
You can imagine my
disdain later in life when this has all been broken down and divided like an
early 19th century traveling Circus Company. This bird was pushed out of the
nest abruptly. You see growing up in a museum paints everything with age and
history and cob webs and wrinkles and glistening knowing eyes. Perhaps it is
too good to be true because, like ‘poof’ it is gone. All is temporary. I am
left with the world, my museum to navigate.
Sometime in the mid to
late nineties, while living at the Chelsea house, the Chelsea museum, where I
am probably wearing stirrup pants and carrying around a cassette tape player
playing Mariah Carey hits, a witty, stylish and successful uncle enters the
scene. This uncle introduced a level of creativity and expression I would draw from for years to come. I suspect I started wearing my grandfather’s cashmere sweaters and argyle socks
as a result. Uncle Steve’s stylish good looks and keen eye for design
reinforced my affinity for quality fabrics, menswear and witty gay men. In all
families there has to be the one you feel you can be an excellent you with. You know, the 'You' with freshly styled hair, a well-fitted and function appropriate dress, witty things to say and an exciting industry insiders party to attend. Perhaps I could project outside my teenager self something still remaining to be imagined that I could grow into as that stylish, successful adult. Instead of the awkward teenager I was.
In what looking back is a
very short amount of time, but a large portion of my coming of age, the party,
this life, had one by one come to a close. My grandfather is going in for
triple bypass surgery, a 'common' occurrence, and I am not yet in high school. It is not six months later
that he doesn’t make it out of recovery. And you know those two old birds, Nana
and Grandy, who take the first place trophy for showing their love and bitterness towards each other through
constant bickering, who were married for over 50 years and were succeeded by
four children and five grandchildren, they passed within six months of each
other.
I am suddenly left with
my dad in someone else’s museum and the heirs have come to sort through the
ancient remnants of coupons and recipes organized by category and stored away
for the future that has slipped away, through an entire wall filled with
tupperware and every reader’s digest from the last twenty years. When it came
time to place a colored sticky tab on who wants what of the jewelry I had
checked out. I still had to live here. They could all go home after this to
their homes and seemingly established lives with each other to lean on and
vacations to plan. At this point, blacking a few of these events felt like a simple solution as painting over a mistake with Bob Ross on public television. There seemed to be no escape from a now uncomfortable situation.
My dad and I, an
interesting combination, are the last two remaining in the boxy blue house with
a red door and once welcoming entrance in the Chelsea house. He fares on the lonely
insomniac schizophrenic side, hearing voices and talking to God in front of me,
and then is described as the life of the party when around his brothers. Myself clutching onto a faint dream of
writing a great work of fiction/non-fiction that I later come to find out is
just memoir, has no clue of whether I will make it to past thirty and if by then I
won’t be talking to walls like my father. My dad is tricking me between his
reality where there is a real life God that talks back, the reality everyone
else chooses to see when he is rooting on Cal Ripkin and the one you may have
learned to live in when growing up in a house of hoarders with bad habits of
smoking several packs a day and going off of their medications. No one would be
coming to fill the now emptied estate during the holidays this year. Then, my
dad is killed in a car accident less than a year since his parents passed. As
fate would have it. In this, I learn, birds
of a feather sometimes go to sleep together.
Five years after losing
my father so suddenly and acquiring a college diploma in business-snore, honestly
why didn’t I just spend the $50,000 or one fourth of an estate on a photography
degree or a glass blowing masters or a grand adventure? Needless for me to say
the James Madison University diploma from the college of business seemed about
as useful and interesting as a place mat I hadn’t seen since the circus left
town. After talking about it all summer, after graduating college, the year was 2005, after
dropping an expensive shish-ka-bob on a white pair of pants on a nice lady in
the nice restaurant I worked at, I decided I had to pack up my 1995 Toyota
Camry and leave Virginia Beach for New York City. The gritty
hot summer had not yet melted into fall and the great recession was a good year
off.
As the electricity of
another New York City
borough weekend musical dies down and prepares for the gutter cleaners to clear
away the fallen dreams, the youthful eyes from the Buschwick lofts look out and
see the world as endless possibilities. My parents suffered paranoia delusions.
I grew up with death and sickness and smoke and mental illness, with Hummel
figurines and dollies and southern fried chicken.
And when all I could see
was a suburban, stupid kid, transplanted to a dirty expensive city, I felt like
an impostor. Worse, I was considering the lineage of my genes and the age I was
approaching, that both parents were institutionally crazy, and I was paralyzed
with the thought of the possibility. How was I going to rise to sipping bubbles
with David Sedaris types and handle an equally crazy diagnosis as I have come
to find out both of my parents suffered? Answers to many of my questions of why
have I landed in a large loft apartment with the final remnants of an
inheritance account in this one moment in time in this one life all alone still remain to be explored.
Like the memoirs that imprinted on me
then, I aim to speak to that girl lost in New
York City in a big boxed book store in Union Square
sipping on Starbucks. To say, “Recipes are great when you have the ingredients
to cook the food, other times they are just pieces of paper.”
Perhaps had I not lost myself for so long and become a shell of a person, barely functioning, I could have seen what I see now. The world at my fingertips. The universe and technology today. My family and how close we are now and could have been or couldn't have been because we all were hurting in our own ways. I wouldn't have seen my diploma as just a piece of paper, I would have seen it as a recipe, my choice and freedom to choose the ingredients to create anything my hearts desire. And perhaps that is what hurts the most. The world at your fingertips and your puppet crumpled in the floor as the world passes you by. Such a shame to only see a piece of paper and not all of the possibilities. This. One. Life.
