Places I've Lived part 9 (off campus)

Midland Avenue, Bronxville, NY

The last time I dropped acid was on Midland Avenue.

It was a large one bedroom, pre-war, with an eat-in kitchen and plentiful closets. The phone was an old rotary, built into the kitchen wall, emblazoned with a sticker that read: Property of Bell Telephone. The apartment was without other jacks, and we were unable to plug in an answering machine. We hated to answer the phone, so we had a ring code. We didn’t like to answer the door either, so if we weren’t expecting anyone, we wouldn’t do it. I’d grown up primarily in houses, but it was here that I realized the marvelous appeal of having a few floors, an elevator, a few doors, and two buzzers between me and the outside world.

There was lots of sunlight in every unrenovated, hard wood floored room. Ornate molding, plenty of counter space, enough kitchen cupboards to hide the recycling that built up from Dave’s excessive drinking, big windows that looked out at the expressway. We'd watch the cars go by. We'd say to each other "all those people in all those cars, their lives are as important to them as ours are to us." This was a continuous revelation. How could there be that much importance on just one little stretch of four-lane road?

I wonder if it’s my memory or everyone’s that makes it so hard to look back and remember the things that made you feel good, the things that gave you sustenance. I couldn’t remember quite how I was feeling on Midland Avenue, so pulled out my notes from the time. It feels weird reading stuff from 18 years ago, but weirder is that I have the same complaints. The things that sustained me then still do so now: writing, being with Dave. My complaints about Dave are the same. My complaints about myself are the same. I feel very hard toward the myself I was on Midland Avenue. Like if I met me I wouldn’t like myself very much, and I don’t think she’d like me either. I’m not into judgement, and I’ve been trying for a few days to shake it. But there’s nothing for it. I wasn’t a wide-eyed innocent, I was just paralyzed by terror.

We let the unopened mail pile up on the table. Our living room was furnished with rataan, leftover from my mom’s sun room redo. We had a tiny tv with a built in vhs player. We watched Star Trek TNG and The Simpsons and Seinfeld whenever it was on. We smoked lots of grass. It was here on Midland Avenue that we learned to call it grass. We had a friend, another SLC student, who lived nearby, also off-campus. We’d go over to his place and he’d say “you kids wanna smoke some grass?” He’d make us toaster strudel and I’d listen to music while he and Dave played chess. He’d come over to us and we’d make him dinner. He had a habit of always leaving a little green behind, and we always thought it was sweet of him to do it. We were usually short on cash, and I cashed in my childhood savings bonds to pay the electric bill.

This was not student housing. The building was home to families and adults and old people. We were definitely an aberation, and the environment in the elevators was not entirely un-hostile. Our apartment was a rental only because the woman who’d lived there had died, had no family, and the co-op board hadn’t yet figured out how to sell it. The number of the apartment was 5-O, like the police, and it was a running joke with our friends. People came over and we’d cook. We started to really get into cooking. We realized we could make way better food at home than we could afford to eat out, so home cooking became our m.o. I learned to make marinara, and I ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every day. The oven exploded on Dave once when he waited too long to light the pilot light. I took him to the ER in a taxi. We were very obviously judged by the Bronxville ER doctor, who seemed to think that the gas explosion was a result of an std somehow. Our neighbors beat their kids. I feel pretty terrible for not reporting them for it. I suppose kids are into their twenties by now.

I wonder at these happy love stories, when people are so in love that they’re dancing across the earth smelling roses on each other’s breath. With Dave and I love felt more like clutching to a tree branch in a typhoon. We were each other’s branch; everything else was the typhoon. We wanted to spend all of our time together. It was the only time we felt safe.

We’d moved in to the co-op on Midland Avenue just before New Year's Eve, but New Year’s Day saw us back in Phily to clean out the dregs of the last apartment and get our deposit back. After that we went to the Mummers Parade. It was ice cold. We stopped into a friend’s family’s restaurant on Broad Street to warm up and since they wouldn’t let us pay for any drinks, we drank rather too much. Everyone was trashed. We ended up talking to this guy, who was licensed to marry people for some reason, who’d been marrying people at the impromptu Jerry Garcia memorial last summer, where we’d been actually. Dave said “you should marry us.” I thought that was a bit presumptuous, frankly, but the guy yelled “okay, do ya?” And Dave said “yes,” and the guy looked at me said “okay, do ya?” and I said “I guess.” The guy said “you’re married!”

And we toasted to it.

After the parade we walked up to the bus station on snowy 12th Street.

“Do ya?” Dave asked.
“Do I what?” I asked back.
“Do ya wanna get married?”

I was twenty. I was in love. I didn’t want to get married. But I didn’t want to break up, either. “Yes,” I said. We kissed in the snow. At the bus station we used some quarters and a pay phone to call our parents and tell them we were engaged. Of all the parents, the only one who was happy for us was Dave’s mom Suzanne. The irony, of course, is that of all four of our parents, she was the only one who didn’t live to see the wedding.

My mom said “you are not getting married until you finish college.” Classically, she doesn’t remember saying that, but just as classically, her determination to set the rules got me out of something I wasn’t ready to do. She decided that the engagement would be at least two and a half years long, and that was that.

The last time I dropped acid, we had a friend visiting. P had a few sheets of white blotter and we took some. As the night wore on, strange ideas began to emerge. One specifically odd thing was that P told a story about how images were coming back from Mars showing a crucifix on the highest Marsian mountain. He told the story as though it were fact, but in actual fact this was from a story Dave had written months earlier, that P had read. Everything got weird from there. I don’t know what P wanted, but it seemed to be something pretty serious. Dave wanted him to leave.

How I was the one elected to escort a fellow lunatic out into a blizzard at dawn is still a mystery to me. As I walked P toward the Tuckahoe Metro-North stop, explaning to him that he had to not stay with us, I told him that Dave and I were engaged. I’d felt awkward telling him that, because there’d been sort of an unrecognized thing between us, even though it never went anywhere. I had little sort of things with lots of people actually. It was like I would feel, when someone was attracted to me, that I didn’t want to let them down by not returning the affection. I think Dave knew of my difficulty in telling the difference between friendship and the other thing, and that the engagement was his way of saying “choose it girl: me or everyone else.”

We were in love. And I was deranged. It was all I could do to keep my head straight. I was self-involved. I was more interested in knowing how much I was loved than loving anyone back myself. I overlooked things that should not have been overlooked, because I felt loved. I opened my eyes to see what was right in front of me and when I saw it I pulled a veil down. Dave always said that when I make art I rip the veils away to expose the honesty beneath, whereas he liked the look of the light coming through all that fabric, and added more. He taught me how to ignore the painful shit that stared you in the face. He taught me how to get through the night. Only one of my good friends thought the engagement was a good idea, and she was a romantic posing as a realist. There were alot of us at Sarah Lawrence. My friend G said I was probably into girls and that marrying a man would be a real bad idea. I told her love is love, it hasn’t got anything to do with gender. She thought that was a cop-out.

We spent alot of time with Chris Kelley and the artists he introduced us to, Alex Arcadia, Rene Ricard, Alfredo Martinez, Donald Baechler. We liked the visual arts scene: feeling like an outsider, masses of drugs, feeling like part of it, feeling like part of everything.

In the summer of 1996 we headed out to Philly to visit Dave's dying mother. Stepping into the hallway and locking the door behind us, we heard the phone ringing on the other side of the door. We did not go back to get it. Knowing but not knowing, the whole ride down, what the voice on the other end of the line would have said. Dave willed himself to 'not know' hard enough to make it to PA without breaking down.

This is where the nightmares finally stopped, but they turned into night terrors first. Night terrors are a paralyzing situation where your mind is awake but your body is alseep. Your eyes are open and you are dreaming and your dreams appear before your eyes as though they’re really happening. All the while you can’t move, or scream, or do anything other than watch it unfold. The worst of these were a cackling woman on the fire escape who scraped her finger nails against the glass, and a man in a yellow bathrobe who hovered outside my bedroom door. I learned to control my dreams while I was dreaming, and then was able to make it stop.

I realized vaguelly that I probably still believed in God. We spent an incredible amount of time trying to determine the nature of meaning.

When I got back to school after a year off, I felt like I was too far behind my classmates. I felt removed from everyone. I took the most challenging courses I could, to compensate. Dave read all my course work too, and we’d talk about it. He made it so that studying wasn’t something I was doing, it was something we were doing. Even though I was walking the woodsy, winding path to school every day, and he was working at Starbucks, we were doing this together.

I switched dons. I went from sts to philosophy. Once I saw my old don walking down the path and I avoided him. He yelled at me, and I remember thinking, I should have told him I was switching dons; and this is why I can’t work with you: you are bitter, and you yell. For some reason this moment of seeing him on the path one early morning before class still haunts me. He was so angry. My new don was Bob Zimmerman. He was my new philosophy professor. I had no direction, but he showed me that before you can have a direction you need to have a fixed point from which to direct yourself. It was with his forceful recommendation that I got a job working in the PR office at school. I worked ten hours per week during the school year and full time over summers. I got a gig producing with the student run theater company, Downstage. It was me and 6 other girls. Sasha, Karen, Tara, Jacquetta, Ivy, Shira, and Kevin Confoy was the prof. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to produce my own shit.

I felt like every door was wide open, but with so many options, I didn’t know which one to walk through. More often than not, I built a small box around myself, with no entrances or exits, only windows, and looked out at the world of doors. I banged my head against the walls of the box, I looked around for something to use to smash the windows, but I never realized that I’d built the box myself, and that I could dismantle it using just my hands for tools.


My don Bob Zimmerman and a former student. From the PR archives.

Also from the PR archives, but this one features my friend Layla holding court on the right.

A trustee, from the PR archives.

Sarah Lawrence College men's basketball team, 1970-71

My aunt's wedding that year.

Chris Kelley at his place on 1st Ave.

Dave and Chris in the gold room.

Jessie and I.

Me and my sister Abbey.

Places I've Lived part 8 (another not home)

An apartment complex, Weymouth, MA

My dad lived here by himself. It was the first and last time in his adult life that he ever lived alone. He and my mom were young when they met, and then there was me, and by then he was an adult. At this point in my dad's life he had three kids, although he only knew about two of us, and he lived alone.

It was pretty strange coming to visit my dad. I'd lived with him since birth, and suddenly he was the one on the other side of the visitation wall. My dad and I had always been pretty close, but here we were separate, the chasms of divorce and state lines between us.

The place felt way too new to be part of a real life. My brother Nick’s little bedroom was much the way I remember my room’s at my mom’s places to have been when I was a kid. A well-stocked toy box, but everything still in its original box. Clothes hanging neatly in the closet, but without the wear that comes from daily use. The bed was soft, but the sheets were too crisp, infrequently slept in.

Our family had been torn apart. Nick and his mom back at the old house, my dad in his too-new place, and me at my mom’s. I know it was hard for Nick and his mom. Life was different without having the other two people around to help. Nick was four. My son is a little more than three right now, and I can see how hard it would be to manage a toddler alone. Especially if you feel broken down and used up inside, have an uncontrollable desire to drink excessively, are broke, angry, and without career skills. The last thing on the list is what always knocks me out of the park with empathy for Nick’s mom. She’d been married at 21. Prior to that she’d been a model, and a receptionist. Her highest level of education was high school. She suddenly reentered the job market in her 30’s, having been a homemaker for however many years. Her best thing was child care, and that from personal experience alone, not professionally. It was like anger had poisoned her blood. She was angry at everyone: my dad, my mom, me for being ripped away from her. We'd been together since I was five years old and she always said she was my real mom. Anger that deep can really fry a person.

I tried to arrange it so that my visits to see my dad were during times when he had Nick. But it was pretty unpredictable, since Nick’s mom would change the rules at the last minute, and sometimes there’d be a whole weekend where I’d come back planning to see Nick and didn’t get to see him at all.

But there were a few times, or maybe just one, when I stayed with Nick and his mom for a few days back at the old house. It was so hard to be there. I was afraid of Janet’s anger, of how much loyalty she expected from me. I spent the whole time with Nick. We’d play in the yard, or I’d read to him, or we’d watch Sesame Street Christmas on vhs. Once he was in bed I started writing a story for him, about us. I called it The Adventures of IbIc, because it was the adventures of Lib and Nick. In the story, we had a secret headquarters just north of the Arctic Circle. I wrote him four of these stories over the years, the artwork getting more elaborate, the stories more apocalyptic. I don’t know how appropriate they were for a little kid, but he understood everything that was really important. He understood that no matter what fucked up things would happen to us it was me and him against the world, and that at all costs, we would joke about it.

When Nick wasn’t there it was just me and my dad. I had blue hair. I wore West German military surplus and combat boots and beautiful things bestowed on me from my mom's closet. When it was just me and my dad we’d stay up late and watch tv. We’d get a pint of Haagen Dazs. My dad would take a butcher knife and hack the pint down the center, putting each half into a bowl. We would each eat the whole thing, and we would laugh at Saturday Night Live. We would try to get some of our lives back.

When we spent time together in this apartment it was like two entirely alone people being in the same space together, and we both knew it. It was like I was looking at my dad through glass. I could hear him, and see him, but I couldn’t really touch him, could barely feel the warmth of his hand if he pressed his palm against the clear surface.

My dad found Jesus when I was seventeen years old. I lived with my dad until right before he found Christ hiding there in his heart. I felt discarded when my dad was born again. I felt like part of some repented past life that was too full of regrets to be cherished. I’d basically had a pretty strong faith until the divorce, and then when prayers for my family to stay together went unanswered, I gave it up. It was painful to give it up, and I grieved for it. My dad had a new church, and I would go with him if I was there on a Sunday, but I felt so left out. I felt like somehow my dad had taken up this whole new perspective and was judging me through that lens. And I was like, that’s a brand new fucking lens! I see your old fucking lenses right there on the table! You held me to completely different standards yesterday, and now you’re changing all the rules, and judging me according to those rules, without a) telling me the fucking rules, or b) asking me what I think of the rules, or c) saying honey, I love you so much, these are the new rules, can we try and live up to them together?

Maybe he did try c. Maybe I was too angry to be able to hear it. I remember how his smile was sad and far away when he looked at me. But I was a teenage girl, and I needed my dad. I needed his guidance, and I didn't know how to get it.

So I turned away from him. And I turned away from God. I tossed the last handful of dirt onto the coffin of my faith. Things were easier for me once I did that. It would be a few more years before the nightmares stopped, and they got worse before they got better, but I was determined to banish god (it was lower case, from then on) from my own personal artistic and philosophical eden.

Looking back I can see that turning to God was a very painful experience for my dad. Opening your heart is much harder than closing it, and his atrophied muscles were fighting back. Mine were fighting too, but in the opposite direction. He was actively pursuing that which I was trying to destroy.

During this time dad took me skiing in Vail. The great thing about going skiing with someone you’re angry with is that you don’t have to talk much while skiing, and by the time dinner rolls around you’re just real tired. When you’re up on the lift you just talk about how beautiful it is, and how you can’t feel your toes, and you watch the skiers cut their turns as they come down the mountain. We drove from Denver out to Vail. There are some windy mountain passes with only a sliver of a guard rail. My dad was driving as we neared a blind curve with a steep mountain drop.

Dad
Do you ever feel like you want to drive right off the edge of a cliff?

Libby
No I absolutely do not.

Which was a lie. I felt like careening off the edge of a cliff all the time. But instinctively knew the rule I would only hear verbally in college. “If there’s two of you, you can fly, if there’s one of you, then you cannot fly.” I did not want to fly.

On my trips back to Massachusetts, I took the train from Philly to South Station, Boston, and headed over to my dad’s office. One trip, I arrived at my dad’s office while he was still in a meeting. I plunked in his office to wait. There were photos on the shelf behind his desk, mostly of me and my brother. But there was another photo, of a young girl I didn’t recognize. My first thought was that my dad was dating someone and this girl was that someone’s daughter, and I thought what the fuck is she doing in a frame in my dad’s office. I asked dad’s secretary who the girl was, and she said “you better ask your dad.”

I waited until we were in the car, driving back to the too-new apartment in Weymouth, before I asked.

Libby
Who was that picture of that girl on your desk?

Dad
Do you remember Debbie?

Libby
Do I have a sister?

Dad laughed. I'd guessed right, and he was surprised.

Dad
Yes you do.

I remembered Debbie. I remembered her in little snippets because the memories were early ones. She’d lived with us when my dad worked in DC, then moved with us to Lawrence. She’d been pretty, and she was nice to me. I was seventeen, so I did some math. She’d had a daughter who was now twelve years old. I was five years older than her, which means she was born a year before my dad had married Janet, my brother Nick’s mom. I didn’t remember my dad and Debbie splitting up, but I had remembered getting Janet and Debbie confused, mostly because Janet told me I had called her Debbie by mistake.

One thing was clear: I was angry. But I knew that already. The new thing was that I had a sister. She was twelve. I had alot of questions. Dad answered “God told me to go find her.”

We went upstate to visit my sister and to meet her family, although Debbie had died several years past. We stayed in a motel near Abbey’s home. I remember we all felt a little strange. And I didn’t know what was going to happen. Abbey jumped on the bed. I didn’t know how to make a relationship with this new person who looked like she belonged in my family. I did know that I wanted to try. I also knew that a twelve years is a long time to grow up without a person who suddenly shows up and says she’s your big sister. At the same time as I gained a sister, I felt like I’d lost one. There were all those years we could have been together, and it felt painful to think of how things could have been between us. I wanted to make up for it. But with a task like that, I was destined for failure.

The following summer my mom invited Abbey to stay for a few weeks at our home in Philly, and so she did. That must have been the summer after senior year. In retrospect, it seems incredibly gracious and kind to invite your ex-husband’s long lost daughter to spend time at your home with your husband and children, but it seemed almost normal at the time. This is probably because my mom goes out of her way to appear effortlessly gracious and generous, and she succeeds on both counts. She makes it look easy.

My dad had given me a credit card for emergencies. So I took Abbey on a shopping spree. And the next time I had the chance, I did it again. And again.

me and dad at dad's place. Nick tool this photo when he was four.

me and Nick.

me and Nick.

the first picture I ever saw of my sister Abbey.

my friend Carolyn and I at my dad's place.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

End of the Work Week

Today marks the end of my work week. Granted, I only work three day weeks these days.

There are the obvious, inevitable downsides to working only three days per week. And some times I think those downsides are bad enough that I should get a different job. The problem is, every time I think I should get a different job, I realize that I don't much want to work more than three days per week, and some other job would probably insist that I work more days than three. Some other job would probably want me to actually arrive at work on time, would probably be annoyed when I did things like pop out for a rehearsal in the middle of the day real fast, or leave early to go to some project, or meet a friend, or just because I want to get home to see my little Mr. C. So I stick. I do more week in three days than I used to do in four, and at the end of the third day, the upsides outweigh the downsides.

Last night I had a show, tonight I went to a friend's talk on architect Paul Rudolph, and I haven't seen Mr. C. for anything other than breakfast since Monday. I'm glad I'll get to see him for all the next four days. I have loads of project type work to do too, but I'm not too worried about that. Once everyone's out of the house and I get Charlie to myself, I feel like I can clear my head a little and start to get organized.

There are some fundamental changes that happen at the end of my work week.

I put my ear buds away.

I switch from my nice bag to my "rescue pack."

And my notebook gets covered in paint.

Those upsides are pretty sweet.