March 2002
There is a form of colorblindness in which the world is reduced to shades of grey, like a black and white film. (Funny that “black and white” really means “shades of grey” in this context.)
What must that be like?
I’ll tell you what I think. I think if one previously saw colors, it’s crushingly sad. And then in time one adjusts, by which I mean forgets.
The healing power of forgetting.
And then there are those who are born in a grey world. This seems worse still: to know that there are colors—right here, here, and here—that you’ve never seen and never will see. I doubt this could ever be forgotten.
28 March 2002 | It
A couple on the inbound 1 train. She’s got her arms folded across her chest. Both are trying to kept this private.
Him: It’s not what you think it is.
Her: What do you mean “it’s not what I think it is”? Is it or is not what you told me it is?
Him: I don’t know what I told you, but I can tell you’re thinking it’s something else.
Her: Like what?
Him: Like I don’t have to say what.
Pause.
Her: Fine, it’s not that, I believe you.
Pause.
Her: But that doesn’t stop me from feeling hurt by it.
27 March 2002 | Strike
I set up a “bowling alley” at the beach house, using plastic cups as the pins and Rachel’s dimpled yoga ball as the bowling ball. To save time replacing the pins, I taped little colored pieces of paper on the floor where the pins went.
This photo shows my reaction to yet another strike.
26 March 2002 | Sign
It was Rachel’s idea to steal the duck sign. It’s on Broadkill Road, a few miles from her mother’s beach house in Delaware. Had we succeeded, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this. This raises the question of what I’m not telling you. I’m not telling you a lot.
Rachel spotted the sign on her way back from Kmart, where she’d bought four containers of contact lens solution (Delaware has no sales tax, so Rachel likes to stock up on stuff like contact lens solution). She immediately stopped the car and got out to check the bolts. The bolts seemed easy enough to unscrew, although the top bolt would require a stool or something to reach.
When she returned to the beach house, she reported her findings and asked for my help. I agreed so long as we didn’t get caught. My philosophy is, I’ll steal signs with my girlfriend but I won’t get caught.
After much discussion (sign stealing is not a felony, we decided), more investigation was deemed necessary, so we drove back to the sign, bringing two large wrenches and a foot stool. If all went well, we would steal the sign in the middle of the night, when few people used that road.
Things went badly. There was almost no shoulder on the sign side of the road, which meant we couldn’t park the car in a way that would block view of what we were doing. Worse, the top bolt was higher than Rachel had described: a good four feet above my reach. We’d need a small ladder to do the job, and there was no small ladder back at the beach house. We considered using the car as a ladder, with me standing on the roof, but that seemed crazy. What if a car suddenly appeared in the distance? At best, I’d have time to jump down from the roof, or perhaps lay flat across it, but there’d be no time to move the car, which would be parked right against the sign, sticking out halfway into the lane.
I turned to Rachel and said, “I’m not sure we can do this,” by which I meant, “No fucking way am I doing this,” and we returned to the beach house.
The next day, heading back to Brooklyn, we stopped again and took some photos. It was sad. Rachel really wanted that sign, and I wanted to get it for her, and it had all come to nothing.
About the only good thing is that I can tell you about it.
22 March 2002 | Tape
At Paul and Julie’s anniversary party, a video was played of their wedding. People stood around the television and watched themselves wishing Paul and Julie a happy marriage, one year earlier. When Annie appeared on screen, the tape was paused so that Julie could run outside and get Annie, who evidently did something funny at this point.
Nobody said anything while Julie was gone, and then Julie returned with Annie and the tape was started again. On the screen Annie took a long drag of an imaginary cigarette and said, “We’ve come a long way, baby, but we don’t know where the fuck we’re going.” That got a big laugh, although I sensed that most people had heard it already, either because they were there when she said it, or more likely because they’d seen the video before.
It struck me then that this wasn’t just the anniversary of Paul and Julie’s wedding, but of their wedding video, and I thought that someone should have been making a video of this party as well, to be played at next year’s party, and so on.
In Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, an old man listens to snippets from recordings he’s made on his birthday at various times in his life. In each recording he mentions the same pathetic story, except that the story changes over time—or doesn’t change exactly, but falls apart. In the end, disgusted with what he’s heard, Krapp records a new tape…
Ah, I just found the text online! This isn’t what happens at all!
Two narrow strips of tile are missing from the edge of the second floor landing. These strips have been missing since I moved here twenty months ago and were probably missing long before that. It’s obvious what happened: the repeated impact of shoes on tile jarred the tiles loose, for they were vulnerable there, with nothing to brace them on the “stairs” side of the landing.
Well, actually, one tile remains, although it’s missing a corner and is no longer secured to the floor. Sometimes I find this in its former position at the lip of the landing, but more often it’s at the back of the top stair, having been knocked from its perch. Evidently someone in the building unthinkingly believes that it should go where it once belonged, and keeps moving it back.
Each time I pass the landing, I notice the tile and think something like, “There’s that fucking tile again.” Assuming I pass the landing four times a day, I’ve now seen it 2,400 times. Surprisingly, perhaps, I’ve never considered doing anything about it, despite the fact that it’s no longer serves a purpose and might even pose a danger. Yes, it probably does pose a danger, particularly to people who imagine, not having seen it 2,400 times, that it’s glued to the landing.
Coming up the stairs this morning, I suddenly realized the solution that I could simply throw the damn thing away. What liberation! It was like the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy discovers that she can get back to Kansas by merely clicking her ruby slippers a few times – ruby slippers she’s been wearing since that fabulous early scene with the Munchins, after she lands on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and Good Witch Glenda appears and starts talking up Oz.
Or maybe it wasn’t so much like all that, because after all, how was Dorothy supposed to know the bit about the ruby slippers, whereas I’m obviously a loser for needing to see a thing 2,400 times before realizing where it belongs.
19 March 2002 | Updates
» On January 29, in a piece entitled MIAs, I lamented having forgotten four of the not-so-many women I’ve slept with. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve since “recovered” three of the missing. One is a good friend, another practices Scientology, and a third is my former wife. You may wonder how I could have forgotten my former wife. Well, she wasn’t really my wife; I merely helped her with her immigration problem. Our sexual relationship was limited to a single incident which took place long before becoming man and wife.
» In Garbage, posted on February 26, I documented my non-confrontation of a man poking around in the garage in front of my apartment building. The next day the building manager cleaned up the man’s mess, but soon after, a new mess appeared. A few days ago the same thing happened: someone, presumably the same guy, knocked over a garbage can and tore open all the trash bags, spilling the contents on the ground. Was he looking for something? Was he trying to deliver a message to someone? Fuck if I know; my plan, though, is to wait until I run into him again and ask.
» On March 14 I wrote The Third Balloon, a piece about the balloons stuck in the tree outside my bathroom-mate’s window. The strange part of that story was the sudden appearance, after a year and a half, of a third balloon. Now that balloon has vanished. Ever the rationalist, I still believe what I wrote in the original piece: that there were always three balloons, I just failed to revise my thought that there were two. Ah, but has what happened to the third balloon? The string that held it to the tree became worn and broke; it flew away.
» On February 4 I posted a piece called Happening in which I described a disturbing and mysterious incident involving a posse of Hasidic Jews, a prone man, a cop with a flashlight, and some indiscernible cries. A week or so later I investigated further, walking to the spot where the cop had stood peering over the wall at the edge of the platform, his foot on the prone man’s back. It turns out I was wrong about what’s down there. It’s not the grass along the side of the BQE, but the BQE itself. However, I don’t believe the cop was looking at the BQE. No, he was probably looking at the metal walkway at the bottom of this huge traffic sign that’s directly under that spot. Or not at the walkway, but at the thing on the walkway, a person. Although I have no way to confirm this, I now believe that some person, a Hasidic Jew, was lying or standing on the walkway and moaning in pain. How did he (he sounded like a he) come to be hurt? Well, either the prone man hurt him or he hurt himself jumping onto the walkway. Why did he jump onto the walkway? To get away from the prone man.
I didn’t find out about my colorblindness until Driver’s Ed. class in 9th grade. The test consisted of a series of cards covered with dots of color. You were supposed to see large numbers on the cards, ghosted between the dots, but all I could see, at least in most cases, were dots.
At first I didn’t understand what was happening. I turned to the guy to my left and said, “There’s nothing on this one, right?” He said, “What do you mean, that’s an 8,” and he traced the number with his finger. Even as he traced it, I saw nothing but dots.
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The number 25
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Nothing but dots
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Nothing but dots
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Nothing but dots
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Faintly, the number 56
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Nothing but dots
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This moment felt like that dream where your teeth fall out.
Has this ever happened to you? You hold your teeth in your hand, knowing your life is different now, because you don’t have teeth anymore, and never will. Except my experience in Driver’s Ed. was different from this in that I never really had the thing I lost. I only thought I had it. I suppose a lot of losses are like that.
I’m red/green colorblind. Best I can tell, this means I don’t see red very well. In effect, part of the color spectrum is shifted in hue towards green. Thus I make “mistakes” distinguishing red from orange, orange from yellow, and yellow from yellow-green. Purple appears to me as a shade of blue; I’ve never understood why it was granted its own color designation.
As visual deficiencies go, colorblindness poses few difficulties. At worst, it makes me question my judgments about color. Time and again, I’ve been told that color combinations I like actually clash. Thus I rarely shop without a friend, preferably someone who knows my wardrobe, and I’m always careful to mention my colorblindness when asked to comment on designs that incorporate color. Most of my shirts and sweaters are black, since black goes with everything.
Recently I learned of a website that simulates colorblindness. In my excitement I thought that the site would show me what normal-sighted people see, but instead it does the opposite, showing normal-sighted people what I see. (Go to www.iamcal.com/toys/colors/ and select “Protanomaly (low red).” Normal-sighted friends have called this a jolting experience, but I wouldn’t know about that.)
It occurs to me now that even if the site worked the way I wanted it to, I still wouldn’t see the colors as they appear to others. This is not about colorblindness but perception, which is always subjective. My eyes have a mechanical flaw that prevents them from fully processing red, but this seems less significant than how my associations for red differ from yours. Those kinds of differences can’t be represented on a website. In fact they can’t be represented anywhere.
I sense here another thing I’ve lost without ever really having had it.
The genius of our method of reproduction was driven home for me in a new way yesterday as Rachel and I attempted to invent a third gender. It can’t be done. Or it can be done, I suppose, but not without stooping to the sort of nonsense that follows.
- Because men and women cannot have physical contact without the risk of infection and possibly death, an intermediary person acts as a kind of all-body condom between the two. This person stretches out over the man and molds itself to the shape of his body, forming a protective membrane. When the man penetrates the woman, his penis is sheathed by the membrane. As the man approaches ejaculation, a small opening appears in the membrane to allow the man’s sperm to enter the woman.
- Men can’t be aroused unless penetrated from behind by a different sort of male (a male2). Male2s have penises but don’t produce sperm; their only role in reproduction is to enable male1s to impregnate women. Although three-person relationships generally begin with a male1/male2 pair, sometimes a male1 will couple with a woman, and together they will seek a male2 to consummate their relationship. Male2s can have sex with women directly, but since no child can result from these acts, they’re thought deviant.
- There are two types of males, and each produces its own form of sperm, both of which are necessary for conception. In one variation, the two forms of sperm must be introduced into the egg in a certain order and within a narrow time-frame, say, forty-eight hours. This necessitates a specialized role for male2s, who are called in when a couple (consisting of a woman and a male1) has had sex and would like to try having a child. Or then again it might be male1s who play the specialized role, joining a woman/male2 couple who have decided to reproduce. But in any case, one or another approach is considered normative, if only to define clear gender roles for the two types of males. In another variation, male2s contribue sperm much later in the process, say, around the three-month mark. Here woman/male1 pairings are normative, while woman/male2 pairings are deviant, although not to the same degree as the various homosexual pairings (deviance being determined by the degree to which a pairing is antithetical to reproduction).
- A woman, having been impregnated by a male1, has sex periodically throughout her pregnancy with a male2, who serves as a kind of filling station, providing sustenance for the growing fetus. A single ejaculation of a male2 takes several minutes.
- Female reproductive responsibilities are divided between two kinds of women. Female1s produce eggs and have sex with men; female2s carry unborn fetuses to term and give birth. Unborn fetuses are transferred between the two women in an as yet to be determined sex act.
Two summers ago the guy on the first floor had a party in the backyard. It was a nice summer party with music and food and what smelled like a boatload of marijuana. The next morning I looked out my bathroom window and saw that there were two balloons stuck in the tree outside my bathroom-mate’s apartment. The balloons reminded me of old sneakers hanging from telephone wires—a thing I’d see in certain “bad” (read: black) neighborhoods we used to drive through, but never stop in, when I was kid. I wondered if my bathroom-mate, a man named Michael (one of three Michaels in the building at that time, out of five tenants), was going to try to get the balloons out of the tree, for they appeared close enough for Michael to nab them from his back window using a rake or mop or some other long thing with a curved thing at the end of it.
But Michael never did this. And now it’s over a year and half later and the balloons have long since gone limp. They’re the kind of balloons which when inflated are shaped like round pillows. One is mostly blue; the other, mostly silver. The strange part is, suddenly a third has joined them. Or did I miss this one before? It too is silver, a sibling of the other. I assume I must have come to think of there being just two balloons when really there were three, and so every time I looked out the bathroom window, I saw two, not three; or rather, saw three and yet failed to revise the thought in my head that there were two. Because the only other explanation is that the third balloon appeared there recently, deflated like the others, faded like the others, and caught in the same cluster of branches.
13 March 2002 | Falling
I was asleep, dreaming, when I heard this tremendous roar, and the building shook, and I knew that I was about to be vaporized. I woke without opening my eyes, without moving, and waited for the light, the fire, to engulf me.
I did not think, as one might imagine, of what had led to this moment, or of the prophesies, or even of my loved ones asleep in their beds. Instead I lay there waiting, or falling—it felt more like falling than waiting, like falling and waiting to reach the bottom of something.
I never reached it.
I live on a street that begins from the exit ramp of the Williamsburg bridge. In the early morning, the traffic is intense. The thing that woke me was a truck roaring past my window.
It’s not the first time this has happened. And before I lived here, it was other things. Periodically over the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve woken believing I was about to be incinerated in a great rolling wave of fire, wider than a city and taller than any building.
It used to terrify me, I used to lay there sweating, my heart pounding… but no longer; or at least not beyond the moment I realize my mistake.
If that is what this is: a mistake.
I can remember two sewers. Three. There may have been more. The only one that mattered was the one in front of the house where the guy who washed his car all the time lived. A lot of balls went down that particular sewer because it was behind home plate when we played on the long field.
So at some point we stopped using new balls and only played with “sewer balls,” as we called them—balls fished from the sewer with a rake. Not a wooden rake; a metal rake: the kind with curved metal tongs on the end.
The hard part was getting the lid off the manhole. It had a slot on one side for you to slip two fingers under. One person would lift and another would grab the lid with two hands and slide it to the side. Before dropping the lid, you had to be damn sure to get your hands out.
The balls were tennis balls and pimple balls and sponge balls.
I did the fishing, since it was my rake.
I’d fish out fifteen, twenty balls at a time, and leave them overnight in a bucket of hot water and bleach. The next day I’d rinse the balls several times, stomp on each for a minute or so, and lay them on my lawn to dry.
Afterwards the balls still smelled like the sewer, but less so. Those were the balls we played with.
10 March 2002 | Change
I don’t read archives. It doesn’t matter whose. Like right now I love whygodwhy. Found it through Fireland several months back. Everything he writes I’d totally never think of. Or if I did, I’d never write it that way. And there’s all this sadness and pain everywhere, but turned inside out.
Still, I refuse to read his archives. I check the site every day, hoping to find something new, but never read the archives. Instead I re-read the current piece, even if I’ve read it five or six times already.
Sometimes it seems like he’s changed a few words here or there, but I know it’s not true: if you stare at something long enough, it appears to change. And in a sense, it does change, because you change the way you see it. But the thing itself, to the extend that there is such a thing—I mean, outside of one’s experience of it—that never changes.
That last thought has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t read archives.
I’m on the uptown 6 train. We stop at Union Square. People get on. There’s an open seat to my right. A woman passes in front of me and is about to sit down when a dorky-looking guy with huge square glasses suddenly appears from the other direction and throws his ass into the seat, bumping her aside. Once he’s in, he says, “Ha ha, missed it.” He’s so psyched. I want to slug him.
*
I get off the train at 23rd. As I’m crossing 22nd Street, two men stride across Park Avenue, Oblivious to traffic. Well, one is Oblivious and the other is nervously following his friend. Both men look beat up and possibly drugged. Cars swerve around them, horns blasting. I stop at the corner to see if they survive.
They survive.
Had brunch with some friends this past Sunday. I don’t understand brunch. Why do we need a special hybrid weekend-only meal? With tax and tip, I paid $16. During the week, that would have been $7. One of my friends said something interesting. He said that in a perfect world, he would watch two movies every day and get high. I suppose I can relate to that, although I rarely do either anymore. But I like the idea (from a distance!) of having pleasurable experiences all day and not producing anything.
The brunch place was called Dizzy’s. Despite the semi-ominous clouds in the sky, we ate at a table outside. I half-wanted it to start pouring, just to see what would happen. The restaurant was packed, with more people waiting for tables, so it wasn’t as though they had room for us inside. I figured that if it started raining, we’d be forced to stand in the aisles, plates in hands, or maybe crouch in the hall that leads to the bathroom. That would have an EXPERIENCE. Alas, a few drops fell on my bagel, but nothing major.
My friend admitted that most days he watches two movies and gets high.
05 March 2002 | Lie
Beginning from when I was six, I worked every Sunday at my father’s pharmacy. This arrangement lasted just a few years, because my father’s pharmacy failed. Later he bought another pharmacy, and that one failed too. I believe he bought four pharmacies in all, all of which failed.
One of my jobs at my father’s pharmacy was to dust all the empty prescription bottles, the glass ones. My father had hundreds and hundreds of these bottles, in various sizes, arranged in rows under the counter where he prepared prescriptions.
Another job I had (I just remembered this) was counting pills for prescriptions. It was illegal for me to do this—you have to be a pharmacist to count pills—so I couldn’t do it when other people were around. Looking back, I see that this was the pharmacy equivalent of sitting in my father’s lap and steering his car as he drove.
The counting of pills involved a special plastic pill-counting tray. It was blue and had an alley on one side into which you slid the counted pills. Since you weren’t allowed to touch pills with your fingers, you glided the pills with an implement much like a butter knife. The alley had a clear plastic flap that closed over it. After you finished counting the pills, you shut the flap and poured the pills into the appropriate bottle or vial. My father let me do the pouring, but I wasn’t allowed to type the label. That’s where he drew the line. You have to be a pharmacist to type a label.
*
My father’s pharmacy had a back room with a cot where my father liked to sleep in the afternoon. Another one of my jobs was to wake the man every half-hour and have him tell me to wake him in another half-hour. With the exception of these periodic attempts to wake my father, I wasn’t permitted in the back room.
One day, though, while dusting empty prescription bottles, I said something to my father that compelled him to take me to the back room and shut the door behind us. I don’t remember what I said, but it must have been pretty interesting, because as soon as we got to the back room, my father sat me on the cot and told me the craziest thing. He said that sometimes he and mother want to be close, as close as they can be, and so what happens is that he puts his penis inside her vagina, because that’s as close as they can be, and then some stuff that isn’t pee comes out of his penis and goes into my mother, and somehow this stuff finds an egg and helps make it into a baby.
My father asked me if I understood, and I said that I had, and then we went back to what we were doing right before my father decided to tell me this.
Naturally I knew my father was lying. I may have been only six, but I wasn’t so easily fooled. The question, though, was why my father had lied to me. Or more to the point, what was his lie meant to conceal?
She was an artist, so I figured she’d appreciate a different approach. Or that was my hope. Plus I couldn’t bear the thought of calling and asking chitchatty questions before getting to the point, particularly since the point would be obvious from the get-go. Better to skip all that. Better to establish from the start that I’m the kind of person who isn’t ruled by convention, who isn’t afraid of experimentation, who embraces irony but is not paralyzed by it, a playful person, an artist, much like her, although nothing like her. Plus I was scared I’d fuck it up.
So I called her (I’d gotten the number from a mutual friend) and said, “Hi, Kathy, this is Michael, would you go out with me?” Except I didn’t bother to pause much between the words, so it sounded more like, “Hi Kathy this is Michael wouldyougooutwithme?”
She laughed, or chuckled, something between a laugh and a chuckle, and said, “Yes.”
“Wow, that’s great,” I said, “really?”
“Sure,” she said, “why not?”
After that, I was forced to improvise.
01 March 2002 | Missing
My favorite poem is #29 from John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. This is the poem I would bring to the desert island of one poem, the poem I would remember in a world in which all but one poem must be forgotten.
I don’t expect you to like it so much. Poems are personal. And for me this poem is associated with a certain time in my life and with an odd incident I’ve never been able to resolve. Before I get into that, though, here’s the poem.
29
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
*
I was in a laundromat in the west 50’s, in what was then called Hell’s Kitchen but which has since been re-packaged as Clinton. I was nineteen. A young woman, a Krishna, struck up a conversation by the dryers. I have only the vaguest recollection of her: dark hair, dark skin, shortish. She came on to me, there’s no other way to explain it. Her method was compelling: she spoke as if everything had already been settled and it was a simply a matter of working out the details of where and when. I asked for clarification of the rules about pre-marital sex for Krishnas. She said it was strictly forbidden, a big no-no, but the way she said this it was as though she were speaking from some point in the future, after we’d slept together, and saying something like, “Oh, I’ve been such a bad girl.”
The weird thing is, I don’t remember if I slept with her or not. I don’t think I did—that is, if I did, I assume I would remember, but it also seems possible that I’ve forgotten.
Another possibility is that I dreamt this.
A third possibility is that I killed her.
I realize that’s a disturbing thought, but sometimes when I think about her, I see this cabin in my mind, a cabin in the woods, and I think that if I did kill her, I probably killed her in this cabin.
Whenever this thought comes to me, I start at the beginning and try to remember what happened after the scene at the dryers. Did we go back to my apartment? To hers? Did one of us suggest a trip to the woods?
I look and look and there’s nothing there.
In more reasoned moments, I compare this to crossing a bridge and wanting to jump. One doesn’t really want to jump; it’s just a morbid fascination with what one could possibly do, in the extreme. In the case of the Krishna woman, the fascination is not with what I could possibly do now, but with what I could have possibly done in the past, again in the extreme.
On the other hand, it’s not a reach to think I slept with her. I’ve been known to do that now and then.
More likely, though, I made her up. That I do all the time.
