"Most people see beauty where there's beauty, Pentimento," my old comrade S., from the days of Bohemia, once said. "But you see beauty where there's none." This habit must have started early; my mother has told me that in the first grade, I pulled another child's discarded drawing out of the classroom trash can, wondering aloud that anyone could possibly throw away something so beautiful.
Once I'd moved the four miles that might as well have been a thousand -- from Washington Heights, that is, to the northern Bronx -- I retained my old habit of walking until the blocks turned to miles. I loved to walk, to walk and to look. I walked around my own gemütlich neighborhood until I had to walk out of it. Then I walked in other, less savory climes: Bainbridge, Norwood, Mosholu Parkway, Fordham Road. I walked the four or five miles to the Botanical Gardens and back again. I walked from the Bronx Zoo to West Farms Square to the Belmont section. I did most of this with my baby strapped to me, trusting that his presence would keep unsavory types at bay, which it did; I don't know if this is true in America as a whole, but there's a by-no-means-negligible amount of respect for women with children in the street culture of New York that can confer a safe passage where none should be expected. It's true that I walked in places where I probably shouldn't have. But to me, it was all beautiful. The sun, the people on their stoops, the weeds blooming in vacant lots, the music, the sound of the elevated subway, the smells of coffee from the bodegas and of diesel from the buses: it made me happy.
Now I live not a thousand, but a million miles away from that time and place. I have left my old life behind, and my old life was, itself, a leaving behind of my old-old life. Here, I walk my son to school first past stately homes with well-kept lawns, and then, after a certain point, past increasingly down-at-heels two- and three-family houses with sagging porches and roofs missing shingles. Beautiful or not, sunny or not, I feel mildly desolate, and I realize it's the people I miss -- seeing them, walking past them, exchanging nods, smiles, hellos. People don't say hello to each other here. Even on these mostly-deserted streets, when someone walks past you, he strenuously avoids looking you in the eye.
One of the school crossing-guards admired the Phishhead hat my former student made for me, so I ordered an extra one and asked her to send it to me, and I gave it to the crossing-guard. I see this particular guard only rarely, because she doesn't work my usual route, but today I had an appointment that required me to cross at her corner, and she greeted me by name. She remembered my name, she told me, because I share it with a popular actress, who happens to be her favorite. She wished me a good day. For some reason, as I walked on, I burst into tears.
We are called, as Rabindranath Tagore said, to become the brother of the stranger. This brotherhood, so fleeting and so rare, melts the heart so that all hostility is disarmed.
Below: XTC's great song "Senses Working Overtime."
Showing posts with label bohemia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bohemia. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
The Tattooed Mothers You Will Have Always With You
My father, whose illiterate grandparents came to America about a
hundred years ago (on the run from personal tragedy, as well as from
crushing poverty and from the hated Camorra who
terrorized Naples and its environs), used to urge his children to look
their best at all times, saying that only the rich could afford to dress
badly, because, for the rich, a sloppy appearance had no consequences.
I was thinking about his exhortation the other day while I waited in the pick-up line for my son outside the neighborhood elementary school. A disturbing -- disturbing to me, anyway -- number of the other mothers sport visible tattoos: not just things like hearts and flowers on their ankles, but things like large pairs of bat's wings across their shoulder girdles. Now, there are plenty of tattooed mothers of young children in New York City, too (including some in my own family), but most of those mothers self-consciously partake in a sort of countercultural-outsider ethos, and tend to be employed in various creative professions, in which their appearance doesn't matter as much as it would if they were working for the man; their life goals, they presume, will be unaffected by the in-some-ways-shocking state of their skin, because they have put themselves outside the mainstream. But there are two ways to be outside the mainstream. The self-conscious, creative-class, New York City tattooed moms generally possess a level of education, or of family money, or, for want of a better term, of cultural capital, that ensures that they will not suffer major consequences from what would seem to be a willing self-exile from the workaday world enabled by symbolically marking their flesh. The tattooed moms in my community, on the other hand, do not have this luxury, and their marked skin sets another bar between them and meaningful employment. So I wonder: is their tattoing truly subversive -- subversive in a way that creative-class tattooing is really not -- because it's a gesture of acknowledgement that, in being poor, they are already irrevocably outside the mainstream? Is it a self-marking of despair?
For the record, I have no tattoos, and I find them unappealing on men as well as women, which I suppose makes me a sort of oddity in my cohort (even up-and-coming opera singers I knew back in New York had tattoos). And I wonder how the subculture of tattooing and body modification made its way from the edges of Bohemia in large urban areas to half-forgotten, post-industrial backwaters like the place I live now, a place that suffers from the worrisome combination of entrenched and widespread poverty and a dearth of meaningful and well-paid jobs, and how its meaning changed en route. Sometimes I want to say to the other mothers in the pick-up line, "Why did you deface yourself like this? What does this mean to you, and what does it mean, socially, here, in this place?" It seems to me that the poor and disenfranchised cannot afford to get tattoos, and I don't just mean that the hundreds of dollars each tattoo costs could be better spent. I mean that there are certain consequences that come with putting yourself outside the mainstream, and that those consequences are particularly harsh if you don't have a cushion of money or education to soften them.
The public library in my new town -- there is only one -- is my absolute favorite place here. I get a rush when I walk through the front doors. You could fit four of my branch libraries back in the Bronx into the Children's Room alone. It is clean and beautiful, and they let me take out all kinds of books on interlibrary loan, and they call me on the phone to let me know when my ILL loans have come in. I take the bus there once a week, and, as I descend the bus steps, I feel the eyes of those waiting to board linger upon me, because people who look like me don't ride the bus here. By people who look like me, I mean people who aren't overweight and in their pajamas though there is also a certain ethnic sameness to the people here which I don't share, a sameness which I suppose comes from centuries of intermarriage among the Europeans who first settled in these hills. People who ride the bus are poor, very poor indeed, too poor for even a few-hundred-dollars' beater car. Another non-tattooed mother in the pick-up line, who teaches remedial reading at the community college, told me that when her students have spent their financial aid grants on textbooks, they're generally strapped for ways to buy food and bus passes for the rest of the semester. In the end, it's very expensive to be poor.
I walk from the bus stop to the library past small, decrepit apartment buildings with "No Loitering" signs affixed to the front doors, past empty storefronts, past a boarded-up old tavern whose walls are choked with climbing weeds. One room of my massive library has been turned into a FEMA disaster assistance site, as have several churches downtown, including the parish where we attend Mass. As I collected my books at the checkout desk the other day, I overheard one of the front-desk workers on a personal phone call. She was broke, she was telling her friend on the phone, not sure when a child-support check was going to come, and lacking even in milk and bread. When I left, I passed a family with young children waiting on the church steps across the street for the FEMA center to open. They all waited patiently, with suitcases piled on the sidewalk around them.
All of this makes me wonder, and wonder again, about the calling I've always strongly felt: to show other people, to teach other people, to guide other people to the sublime beauty of the western classical music tradition. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis about the essential humanity of man's natural "nostalgia for the beautiful," and noted that this "creative restlessness" is part of our longing for God. But what good is it to tell my tattooed cohort about how uplifting, how deepening, how connecting, how humanizing, how healing is the stuff with which I usually deal? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht in Threepenny Opera, "First food, then aesthetics."
And, too, all of this brings me face-to-face with my own hard lack of charity. I do not love these poor; I fear them. They seem so shaky, so unstable, to me; they are so different from me. Though surely not all of these poor are addicts, they remind me of the junkies I used to see around New York, who you could tell were junkies because they were rail-thin, were young but looked old, walked really fast and crookedly, and, when they had fixed, moved in strange, jerky ways, as if they were marionettes. I found them terrifying and repellent even as an adult.
Last week, Mark Gordon wrote a hard-hitting and moving piece for Vox Nova about helping the poor. "[Am] I responsible for helping poor people that I know personally?" he asks himself, then answers:
Yes. Am I personally responsible for helping the poor in my community? Yes. Am I responsible for working toward a just social and political order in which poverty itself is eventually eradicated? Yes. Am I responsible for helping the poor in foreign lands? Yes. The poor who are in this country illegally? Yes. The poor with substance abuse problems or criminal backgrounds? Yes. The poor who don’t appreciate my help? Yes. The poor who disgust me in their helplessness? Yes. All the poor? Yes.
OK, I thought, I'm good with a lot of this. We continue to support N., who's desperately poor and illegal (though I admit to grumbling as I stand at the sink and wash dishes because we just sent the money that was supposed to have gone to a new dishwasher to her when she was in danger of being evicted). I have no problem helping the illegal poor; the fact is, I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the tattooed moms in my community. The reason the illegal poor are here is that they're strivers, adventurers, risk-takers, and extremely brave; they work their asses off; and most of them share my religion. The poor in my community, on the other hand, frighten me. They are not like me. They reject the things I hold dear.
Nonetheless, as Sister Mary Martha wrote in response to a reader who voiced his objections to Appalachian culture more strongly than I have (yes, I know she's not a real nun, but that doesn't make her wrong):
Jesus never had a job and just lived off of other people who put Him up in their houses and fed Him AND all his friends. He actually told His friends to STOP WORKING and hang out with Him. His final words to them was a commandment to never even try to earn money and have any money or nice clothes or even shoes. Lazy slobs. No wonder they were all killed.
Jesus loved sinners. Remember? We never have to condone sin to love a sinner. God does it every single minute. It makes me extremely sad to think that we can not let go of calling people some kind of name and that we insist it is just fine and dandy to do so.
Can you imagine if Father stood in the pulpit said "white trash" and meant it? Why is it not okay for Father to say that, but okay for you?
Maybe it's time to bring back the ruler.
Food writer Mark Bittman (whose recipes I love, but who, as a professional chef friend of mine memorably put it, is prone to a kind of "soapboxing tinged with a**hole") wrote a recent post displaying a similar sort of arrogance and lack of understanding when it comes to the food choices of the poor (yes, similar to my own arrogance and lack of understanding about the poor in my community). Many people in the combox put him straight, and, as one writer put it in a letter to the Times:
Mark Bittman would persuade poor families that nutritious food prepared at home can be cheaper than the fare available at fast-food outlets. He points out that if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway, but doesn’t mention other realities.
Shopping after work means crowded stores and long wait times, which are likely to interfere with child-care arrangements. Then the meal must be prepared, which with Mr. Bittman’s recipes entails chopping, dicing, shredding, sautéing and cooking. After the meal, the preparer must clean up or persuade someone else to do it.
A trip to McDonald’s allows a family to spend time together having their food brought to them, enjoying the meal and walking away, in less time than is needed for the Safeway option.
A big selection of healthy foods isn’t available at fast-food prices. Until it is, Mr. Bittman shouldn’t lecture people who are making not-unintelligent tradeoffs.
In the end, there is an appalling lack of love among some of us who are well-fed, well-educated, and even champions of beauty -- of love, that is, for the unbeautiful. I suffer from this lack, and I pray that God will show me a way to truly love those I would shun. But I fear this love, too, and its consequences.
I was thinking about his exhortation the other day while I waited in the pick-up line for my son outside the neighborhood elementary school. A disturbing -- disturbing to me, anyway -- number of the other mothers sport visible tattoos: not just things like hearts and flowers on their ankles, but things like large pairs of bat's wings across their shoulder girdles. Now, there are plenty of tattooed mothers of young children in New York City, too (including some in my own family), but most of those mothers self-consciously partake in a sort of countercultural-outsider ethos, and tend to be employed in various creative professions, in which their appearance doesn't matter as much as it would if they were working for the man; their life goals, they presume, will be unaffected by the in-some-ways-shocking state of their skin, because they have put themselves outside the mainstream. But there are two ways to be outside the mainstream. The self-conscious, creative-class, New York City tattooed moms generally possess a level of education, or of family money, or, for want of a better term, of cultural capital, that ensures that they will not suffer major consequences from what would seem to be a willing self-exile from the workaday world enabled by symbolically marking their flesh. The tattooed moms in my community, on the other hand, do not have this luxury, and their marked skin sets another bar between them and meaningful employment. So I wonder: is their tattoing truly subversive -- subversive in a way that creative-class tattooing is really not -- because it's a gesture of acknowledgement that, in being poor, they are already irrevocably outside the mainstream? Is it a self-marking of despair?
For the record, I have no tattoos, and I find them unappealing on men as well as women, which I suppose makes me a sort of oddity in my cohort (even up-and-coming opera singers I knew back in New York had tattoos). And I wonder how the subculture of tattooing and body modification made its way from the edges of Bohemia in large urban areas to half-forgotten, post-industrial backwaters like the place I live now, a place that suffers from the worrisome combination of entrenched and widespread poverty and a dearth of meaningful and well-paid jobs, and how its meaning changed en route. Sometimes I want to say to the other mothers in the pick-up line, "Why did you deface yourself like this? What does this mean to you, and what does it mean, socially, here, in this place?" It seems to me that the poor and disenfranchised cannot afford to get tattoos, and I don't just mean that the hundreds of dollars each tattoo costs could be better spent. I mean that there are certain consequences that come with putting yourself outside the mainstream, and that those consequences are particularly harsh if you don't have a cushion of money or education to soften them.
The public library in my new town -- there is only one -- is my absolute favorite place here. I get a rush when I walk through the front doors. You could fit four of my branch libraries back in the Bronx into the Children's Room alone. It is clean and beautiful, and they let me take out all kinds of books on interlibrary loan, and they call me on the phone to let me know when my ILL loans have come in. I take the bus there once a week, and, as I descend the bus steps, I feel the eyes of those waiting to board linger upon me, because people who look like me don't ride the bus here. By people who look like me, I mean people who aren't overweight and in their pajamas though there is also a certain ethnic sameness to the people here which I don't share, a sameness which I suppose comes from centuries of intermarriage among the Europeans who first settled in these hills. People who ride the bus are poor, very poor indeed, too poor for even a few-hundred-dollars' beater car. Another non-tattooed mother in the pick-up line, who teaches remedial reading at the community college, told me that when her students have spent their financial aid grants on textbooks, they're generally strapped for ways to buy food and bus passes for the rest of the semester. In the end, it's very expensive to be poor.
I walk from the bus stop to the library past small, decrepit apartment buildings with "No Loitering" signs affixed to the front doors, past empty storefronts, past a boarded-up old tavern whose walls are choked with climbing weeds. One room of my massive library has been turned into a FEMA disaster assistance site, as have several churches downtown, including the parish where we attend Mass. As I collected my books at the checkout desk the other day, I overheard one of the front-desk workers on a personal phone call. She was broke, she was telling her friend on the phone, not sure when a child-support check was going to come, and lacking even in milk and bread. When I left, I passed a family with young children waiting on the church steps across the street for the FEMA center to open. They all waited patiently, with suitcases piled on the sidewalk around them.
All of this makes me wonder, and wonder again, about the calling I've always strongly felt: to show other people, to teach other people, to guide other people to the sublime beauty of the western classical music tradition. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis about the essential humanity of man's natural "nostalgia for the beautiful," and noted that this "creative restlessness" is part of our longing for God. But what good is it to tell my tattooed cohort about how uplifting, how deepening, how connecting, how humanizing, how healing is the stuff with which I usually deal? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht in Threepenny Opera, "First food, then aesthetics."
And, too, all of this brings me face-to-face with my own hard lack of charity. I do not love these poor; I fear them. They seem so shaky, so unstable, to me; they are so different from me. Though surely not all of these poor are addicts, they remind me of the junkies I used to see around New York, who you could tell were junkies because they were rail-thin, were young but looked old, walked really fast and crookedly, and, when they had fixed, moved in strange, jerky ways, as if they were marionettes. I found them terrifying and repellent even as an adult.
Last week, Mark Gordon wrote a hard-hitting and moving piece for Vox Nova about helping the poor. "[Am] I responsible for helping poor people that I know personally?" he asks himself, then answers:
Yes. Am I personally responsible for helping the poor in my community? Yes. Am I responsible for working toward a just social and political order in which poverty itself is eventually eradicated? Yes. Am I responsible for helping the poor in foreign lands? Yes. The poor who are in this country illegally? Yes. The poor with substance abuse problems or criminal backgrounds? Yes. The poor who don’t appreciate my help? Yes. The poor who disgust me in their helplessness? Yes. All the poor? Yes.
OK, I thought, I'm good with a lot of this. We continue to support N., who's desperately poor and illegal (though I admit to grumbling as I stand at the sink and wash dishes because we just sent the money that was supposed to have gone to a new dishwasher to her when she was in danger of being evicted). I have no problem helping the illegal poor; the fact is, I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the tattooed moms in my community. The reason the illegal poor are here is that they're strivers, adventurers, risk-takers, and extremely brave; they work their asses off; and most of them share my religion. The poor in my community, on the other hand, frighten me. They are not like me. They reject the things I hold dear.
Nonetheless, as Sister Mary Martha wrote in response to a reader who voiced his objections to Appalachian culture more strongly than I have (yes, I know she's not a real nun, but that doesn't make her wrong):
Jesus never had a job and just lived off of other people who put Him up in their houses and fed Him AND all his friends. He actually told His friends to STOP WORKING and hang out with Him. His final words to them was a commandment to never even try to earn money and have any money or nice clothes or even shoes. Lazy slobs. No wonder they were all killed.
Jesus loved sinners. Remember? We never have to condone sin to love a sinner. God does it every single minute. It makes me extremely sad to think that we can not let go of calling people some kind of name and that we insist it is just fine and dandy to do so.
Can you imagine if Father stood in the pulpit said "white trash" and meant it? Why is it not okay for Father to say that, but okay for you?
Maybe it's time to bring back the ruler.
Food writer Mark Bittman (whose recipes I love, but who, as a professional chef friend of mine memorably put it, is prone to a kind of "soapboxing tinged with a**hole") wrote a recent post displaying a similar sort of arrogance and lack of understanding when it comes to the food choices of the poor (yes, similar to my own arrogance and lack of understanding about the poor in my community). Many people in the combox put him straight, and, as one writer put it in a letter to the Times:
Mark Bittman would persuade poor families that nutritious food prepared at home can be cheaper than the fare available at fast-food outlets. He points out that if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway, but doesn’t mention other realities.
Shopping after work means crowded stores and long wait times, which are likely to interfere with child-care arrangements. Then the meal must be prepared, which with Mr. Bittman’s recipes entails chopping, dicing, shredding, sautéing and cooking. After the meal, the preparer must clean up or persuade someone else to do it.
A trip to McDonald’s allows a family to spend time together having their food brought to them, enjoying the meal and walking away, in less time than is needed for the Safeway option.
A big selection of healthy foods isn’t available at fast-food prices. Until it is, Mr. Bittman shouldn’t lecture people who are making not-unintelligent tradeoffs.
In the end, there is an appalling lack of love among some of us who are well-fed, well-educated, and even champions of beauty -- of love, that is, for the unbeautiful. I suffer from this lack, and I pray that God will show me a way to truly love those I would shun. But I fear this love, too, and its consequences.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Music and Memory, Part 24: Theft
I remembered all this today as I drifted into a not-unaccustomed reverie of my former life in a particularly obscure corner of one of New York's many hardscrabble bohemias. I thought of two old friends from that time and place, dancers who'd moved to New York from Austin, where they had performed with Deborah Hay, a legendary postmodern choreographer who'd relocated from New York to Texas in the 1970s. I found some videos of Hay's work on Youtube, along with this brief recent interview:
I was intrigued by what Hay said about not grasping at experience or phenomena; about, instead, being aware of each moment before it passes away and another arises to take its place. I wondered if my clutching at memories, at emotions, at images and sensations evoked by the music I hear and sing, was a symptom of the millennial materialism that she speaks of. Is it harder, I wonder, to mourn the beauty that has gone, or to accept the present moment in all its apparent emptiness? And must emptiness be desolation?
I thought of the Gospel reading for today, in which Christ insists that anyone who wishes to follow Him must take up his own cross. Might one man's cross, I wondered, be that everything beautiful he knows is relegated to the place of memory? Indeed, such a cross must be a rather common one. And might another's cross be having to confront each moment as it is, free from what he thinks it ought to be, and to stand in the place where he finds himself, and even to bloom where he's been planted, be it ever so far from the time and place he has invested with the meaning of "home"? Indeed, at Mass today, when the priest read Christ's words, it occurred to me that every gift bears the cross with it, and that perhaps the cross itself is the gift.
All this made me think of William Blake:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Friday, March 18, 2011
Love and Death in Bohemia
I will read and love just about any memoir of Bohemian New York in the 1950s and 1960s written by a woman (though, having already read several in this rather narrow and self-limiting genre, I have to admit that they all start to run together after a while in a monotonous wash of sex and narcissism). Rotolo's death sent me to the library in search of another Bohemian New York memoir that I'd read several years before, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, by the beat poet Diane Di Prima, because I recalled that Di Prima had had an abortion around the same time, but had written about the experience in a much different way. As I recalled, her description of the abortion and the circumstances surrounding it was not only detailed, but also tormented, even raw, a cri-de-coeur against abortion itself emanating from an unexpected quarter.
Di Prima, a refugee from a repressive Brooklyn Italian girlhood, was living on the Lower East Side, and was already the single mother of one daughter when she became pregnant by the poet LeRoi Jones. Jones, who was married, insisted upon an abortion. As Di Prima tells it,
I was torn apart. Though intellectually I had always held firmly there was nothing wrong with abortion, as woman I felt myself so much the channel of new life, the door into the world; as budding Hindu or Buddhist, I saw all life as so sacred; as the artist I was I felt so deeply that whatever happens has its reasons . . . that there was no way my having an abortion made sense. And too, as lover, everything in me screamed that I wanted this baby, wanted something of this man to keep, to love and live with [in spite of the fact that] I had already given up the notion that we would ever "be together," [as] it was bitterly clear to me that that was not what Roi wanted. . . . [Yet] for me it was all the more reason to want this child.
Di Prima writes wrenchingly about upholding the "code" of the illicit lover, which dovetailed quite neatly with the code of femaleness she'd learned growing up:
The reason not to have the baby was simple: Roi didn't want it. . . . Since Roi didn't want the child, I felt that if I loved him, it was incumbent upon me to have an abortion . . . To show the extent of my love by doing what I felt in fact was wrong. To commit what for me was tantamount to a crime, simply because the man I loved willed it so. And I would take the blame, the consequences, the blood on my hands. And not say anything about it.
It was, after all, the code I had learned, the code of the Italian woman: to do what he wanted and take the consequences.
Later, after traveling by bus alone to western Pennsylvania for the procedure and then back to New York, Di Prima writes about the
Pain in my heart far worse than the cramps. I was writing, persistently writing to the child I had killed. . . . I filled page after page . . . Some kind of ritual goodbye:
"Dear fish, I hope you swim
In some other river . . . "
This heartbreaking passage stands in stark contrast to the self-justifying ethos of individually determined morality that permeates most of Di Prima's long and interesting (if, like me, you like this sort of thing) memoir. It stands in contrast, too, to Di Prima's own earlier description of abortion as "simply women's business. Something you didn't talk about, didn't 'lay on' anyone else, especially not the men. One of the unsung, unspoken ways women risked their lives [for the men they loved]." For Di Prima calls her abortion a "crime," asserts that she killed her child --not exactly what one would expect from one of the ur-mothers of Bohemia, the most visible woman on New York's avant-garde scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, someone who writes quite freely, and with a hint of self-congratulation, about performing all kinds of other transgressive behaviors.
Though Di Prima stops short of calling every abortion a crime -- oh, that women would begin to realize that what sucks for one of us truly sucks for all of us! -- it's a short walk to that conclusion, and her honesty is a far cry from Suze Rotolo's sanitized, oblique account, which strives to uphold the supremacy of "choice." Bohemians and would-be Bohemians, listen up.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
We were the closest of friends: a group of young aspiring artists living in the East Village, moving from one provisional household to the next, drinking Hungarian red wine because nothing else was cheaper, staying up late into the night, sprawled across one another's sofas (which were generally old, upholstered with shabby velveteen, and draped with Indian-print throws to keep the stuffing from spilling out onto the floor), conversing animatedly about art and beauty and the other deepest desires of our hearts. We were young women in our teens and early twenties. We were generally both broke pocket-wise and broken heart-wise, except for the one or two of us who appeared to have found our soul-mates, deep wells into whom we could sink all of our intense need for contact, for engagement, for communion; not one of those unions now survives. We were painters, photographers, writers, musicians, and performance artists. We all worked together in the same cafés and bars and lived within a few blocks of each other, ranging from Avenue B to Avenue D and from East 14th Street down to Rivington.
None of us entered into this circle of friends unfamiliar with betrayal. Some of us went on to betray each other, or our most deeply-held principles. After three or four years we had all dispersed to different parts of the city, because the East Village had gotten too expensive -- a few of us went to Brooklyn, one to Spanish Harlem, one to Inwood (also known as Upstate Manhattan), one to Canada. Having to move physically out of the charmed circle of our magic-aesthetic friendship dealt a heavy blow to its continued existence. Our alliances with our soul-mates likewise crumbled. Some of us attempted to settle down into more traditionally-defined domesticity. One of us had come into the circle already married, but eventually took up with someone else; her husband became gay (I never knew if this was a conviction or a passing fad for him). The two of them had had several abortions already, and when she got pregnant by still another man, she kept the baby, who's now a teenaged girl; sadly, I have heard that the girl's father is now a hopeless crack addict.
But there was one of us who was tough enough, driven enough, and ambitious enough (some would say opportunistic enough) to follow her plans through to the end. S. is now a successful artist, whose works are in collections throughout the world. She picks up plum temporary teaching gigs as a visiting artist, and is not infrequently profiled in the haute women's fashion magazines.
It's been years since I spoke to S., but she recently spent time with our mutual friend G., who now lives in Canada -- S. was there for the opening of a solo exhibition of her works (my friendship with G. is the only one that has endured from that time, and it has never wavered). G. told me about S.'s visit, how S. is still the same as she was twenty years ago -- seductive, self-justifying, and somehow, at the same time, heartrendingly vulnerable and shy. Then G. let drop that S. was pregnant (she is the single mother of a five-year-old), and I asked her about the baby's due date. "There's not going to be a due date," G. replied cynically; apparently the baby was the fruit of a causal one-night reunion between S. and her son's father, but they generally loathe each other. It felt like a blow to my heart.
I began storming heaven, asking the Holy Spirit, during the week leading up to Pentecost, to inspire S. to choose life. I asked G. to float the idea of adoption in her conversations with S. I wasn't thinking so much of our family, though we are in the process of adopting. S. is the kind of person -- for all her accomplishments, deeply insecure -- who loves and admires her friends so much that she insinuates herself into their lives in uncomfortable ways, trying to become them, and one of the ways she's historically done this is by sleeping with their boyfriends, so I figured that if we adopted her baby it would all get very messy and complicated fast. But there was a couple I knew, friends of friends who live in the South, a couple who wanted a child and who would be wonderful parents and were removed enough from S. for her not to cause any trouble. Please mention them to her, I begged G.
I spoke to G. yesterday and asked her if there was any news. It was too late, she told me; S. had taken the RU-486 pill, and it was already all over. Besides, S. had told G. that she could never give her child to someone else.
So now, though S. is not Catholic, though as a child she woke up every morning to see her naked, bohemian mom sitting on a different man's knee, though, like so many women, it was easier for her to consider the unbidden, unwanted, unseen life she carried as something best to dispose of, I'm storming heaven again so that she will somehow be inspired to seek and receive the abundant mercy, healing, and forgiveness that Christ is ready to shower upon her.
Ironically, and also too late, S. has just sent me a friend request on Facebook.
None of us entered into this circle of friends unfamiliar with betrayal. Some of us went on to betray each other, or our most deeply-held principles. After three or four years we had all dispersed to different parts of the city, because the East Village had gotten too expensive -- a few of us went to Brooklyn, one to Spanish Harlem, one to Inwood (also known as Upstate Manhattan), one to Canada. Having to move physically out of the charmed circle of our magic-aesthetic friendship dealt a heavy blow to its continued existence. Our alliances with our soul-mates likewise crumbled. Some of us attempted to settle down into more traditionally-defined domesticity. One of us had come into the circle already married, but eventually took up with someone else; her husband became gay (I never knew if this was a conviction or a passing fad for him). The two of them had had several abortions already, and when she got pregnant by still another man, she kept the baby, who's now a teenaged girl; sadly, I have heard that the girl's father is now a hopeless crack addict.
But there was one of us who was tough enough, driven enough, and ambitious enough (some would say opportunistic enough) to follow her plans through to the end. S. is now a successful artist, whose works are in collections throughout the world. She picks up plum temporary teaching gigs as a visiting artist, and is not infrequently profiled in the haute women's fashion magazines.
It's been years since I spoke to S., but she recently spent time with our mutual friend G., who now lives in Canada -- S. was there for the opening of a solo exhibition of her works (my friendship with G. is the only one that has endured from that time, and it has never wavered). G. told me about S.'s visit, how S. is still the same as she was twenty years ago -- seductive, self-justifying, and somehow, at the same time, heartrendingly vulnerable and shy. Then G. let drop that S. was pregnant (she is the single mother of a five-year-old), and I asked her about the baby's due date. "There's not going to be a due date," G. replied cynically; apparently the baby was the fruit of a causal one-night reunion between S. and her son's father, but they generally loathe each other. It felt like a blow to my heart.
I began storming heaven, asking the Holy Spirit, during the week leading up to Pentecost, to inspire S. to choose life. I asked G. to float the idea of adoption in her conversations with S. I wasn't thinking so much of our family, though we are in the process of adopting. S. is the kind of person -- for all her accomplishments, deeply insecure -- who loves and admires her friends so much that she insinuates herself into their lives in uncomfortable ways, trying to become them, and one of the ways she's historically done this is by sleeping with their boyfriends, so I figured that if we adopted her baby it would all get very messy and complicated fast. But there was a couple I knew, friends of friends who live in the South, a couple who wanted a child and who would be wonderful parents and were removed enough from S. for her not to cause any trouble. Please mention them to her, I begged G.
I spoke to G. yesterday and asked her if there was any news. It was too late, she told me; S. had taken the RU-486 pill, and it was already all over. Besides, S. had told G. that she could never give her child to someone else.
So now, though S. is not Catholic, though as a child she woke up every morning to see her naked, bohemian mom sitting on a different man's knee, though, like so many women, it was easier for her to consider the unbidden, unwanted, unseen life she carried as something best to dispose of, I'm storming heaven again so that she will somehow be inspired to seek and receive the abundant mercy, healing, and forgiveness that Christ is ready to shower upon her.
Ironically, and also too late, S. has just sent me a friend request on Facebook.
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