Jul
21
Ten questions
Filed Under astruc
In the olden days, I used to get home late at night, drunk, smoking, still wearing my crumpled party dress, and ramble to my mailing list. Sometimes, the postings would be sanitized and later posted to the public site. I saved a bunch of them. They had titles like she hit him with that paper-weight eiffel tower and calling up a little girl with a bull whip.
I stopped posting those drunken screeds when my list crossed the 500 member mark. But I’m thinking enough years have passed that I could run some of them safely now.
As you guys might have noticed, I’ve been fumbling with this space for a very long time. Back in February, a longtime reader and fellow writer named Suzanne Clinton asked me if I’d be interested in an interview. I was.
The ten questions turned out to be both really insightful and incredibly difficult to answer. Suzanne managed to nail all the questions I’d been asking myself for a very long time, and suddenly I had to formulate answers. For her, and for me.
I sat down to answer them again and again. The first time, in February. The second time, in March, I tried again using Dewars as a lubricant. I got so wasted I ended up drunk-texting Skye, while he was on a ski trip in Canada. He took it with good humor. Then I fell down the stairs.
I stopped drinking altogether after that night.
The next time I tried again, months later, I was sober, and by that time I’d figured it out.
I’m not the same person I was in 1996, when I began this page. I’m not even the same person I was five years ago. There’s been a long, stripping-down sort of process going on while I figured out who I am, whom I want to be.
I peeled away the shock of blond hair, the New York, the Palm Beach, the sun-kissed skin and freckles, the beach, the parties, the cigarettes, the scotch, the men, the drugs, all the props I used to define myself until it was just me, alone in my head, and I was forced to finally focus. It was incredibly difficult. There was almost nothing left when I was done, but what was left turned out to be of critical importance.
Cigarettes turned out to be an enormous loss. I loved cigarettes. I loved smoke. I loved the way it felt– thick, curling, making everything seem blue in the mist. I loved the ceremony of pulling out a pack in a bar and having men light them and smile their little-boy smiles like they’d done something terribly clever. They were my best prop.
And New York. The New York I missed so desperately doesn’t exist anymore. It was the wasteland ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX New York of 1979, when my daddy was still alive and we’d go to Gimbel’s on a Saturday afternoon to the stamp department and he’d buy me a plate block and then we’d go to Peppermint Park for a hot chocolate. It was the New York of the communal Loehmann’s dressing room in Brooklyn with Nan and Aunt Ella.
But without all my extemporaneous bullshit, I had no clue what to write about. I don’t how to write Today I Went To The Bank and What We Are Having For Dinner and My Cat Is So Funny. When Skye and I were still together, one night near the end he asked are you going to write about me?
Every man I have dated since this page went up in 1996 has asked that same question. D’ya think they ask because they’re hopeful? Or because they’re afraid?
For a long time, I was occupying the space between my old life and the new. Now I am slowing down some. I turned 40 in February, and as a gift to myself I set down most of the baggage I was carrying. It occurs to me that if I live as long as my father I have twelve years left. Tick-tock. You wouldn’t recognize me now. Since I stopped highlighting my hair it’s now as dark as my gaze. My dad used to tell me I looked like Dondi. I assume he was referring to the black holes I have where other people have eyes.
I answered Suzanne’s questions.
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11 Responses to “Ten questions”
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Read it, loved it, you done good! xoxoxo
Wow, nice to read this. How cuspy a Pisces are you?
You know, I have no idea. I was born 2/24. I think I just missed one.
….I used to entertain myself wearing my mother’s mink swing coat to the Safeway at the top of Queen Anne Hill….
there is hope. my 9 year old daughter just bought a mink swing cape at goodwill and intends to wear it everywhere as soon as it is cool enough.
I am SO WITH YOU on that missing cigarettes thing. One of the more painful break-ups of my life.
I saw this:
I want the next time I move to be last time I move, so I am not making any decisions today.
And thought, oh hey, I know a little something about that feeling!
As you already know, count me in as someone who’s so happy to see you writing right now. I can’t wait until your book comes out.
Wow. That was awesome.
I like it when you resurface :)
So, just how funny is your cat?
What I find amazing is that I’ve known you online for roughly a decade, dating back to your pre-3WA Greenspun forum. Where has the time flown to?
It is good to see you writing again.
Keep up the fantastic work! Look forward to reading more from you in the future. I think it will be also nice if you add “send to email” tool so people can forward the articles to their friends easily.
“I’m not the same person I was in 1996, when I began this page.”
Nor were you the person you wrote about in 1996 when you started this page. You were a self-fiction. And that’s what accounts for your present-day writer’s block. How to write about the real you?
Pietro, I’m thinking about it. My particular take on things is always going to be wholly subjective. And I do things like change my friends’ identifying features. Back when I was writing the Robin story I did compact a whole bunch of my friends into three people, mostly because I had a group of 11 friends, and I thought it would be too many people for the reader to keep straight. So, not the gospel truth, but not a fiction either.
There are so many things blocking me now, I don’t even know where to begin explaining.
But any way you slice it, this has always been me. I am still me.
Nice to hear from you, by the way. Drop me a line sometime.