In gym, during free play, I played hockey by myself, taking slap shots at an empty goal.
I knew no one at that school and was absolutely alone.
One of my shots, a bullet, struck the crossbar.
A gym teacher saw this and told me to stop. He called me the name of one of the Flyers, I think Bobby Clarke.
“No slap shots, Clarkie.”
He took that away from me.
I loved your idea to speak to me through an implant in my head. The truth is, this already happens. Your voice is in my head. Today H came over to borrow some cat food. We spoke for perhaps five minutes. At one point I looked at her as I had not done before and thought about us having sex. It wasn’t a serious thought. Sometimes I think we are simply animals in what we want of each other—affection, approval, sex—and that everything else is misdirection. Your eyes… I am trying to remember where we were when I first noticed them. Was it the park? Was it on the rock in the park? I think it was. If not, it was the restaurant. No, I think it was the park, I think it was when we played the hand slapping game in the park. Do you remember? You slapped my hands again and again, but I never managed to slap yours. It was because of your eyes. I’m almost asleep now. I feel like my mind is slowly settling and spreading out. It’s like melting ice. It’s like what happens to melting ice. A puddle.
I understand why people do it. And I don’t hold myself above them. I would do it too, in dire enough circumstances. Perhaps not as quickly or blithely, but still. My wrath is reserved for those who sell the lie and those who profit from it.
When defending the practice, its advocates—buyers and sellers alike—repeat the same arguments, often using the same language. It’s spooky and unsettling. I’m often reminded of those scenes in The Manchurian Candidate in which various characters, all former members of a platoon ambushed during the war, offer the same description of their cruel, unfeeling captain: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
So I was looking at Oblivio today with my kid who will turn three this Sunday and thought he might like to see the “Oatmeal” video because one, it has the word “oatmeal” in it and he likes oatmeal and two, because it’s a video and he likes videos. I start to download it or upload it or whatever and it’s taking forever because I have as you might expect an ancient, slow crusty bucket of bolts for a computer and he becomes very impatient, not understanding why any video would take more than a second to start, but he waits it out (about twenty minutes) and when it’s fully loaded I put him on my lap and play it. And I think, oh, that’s right, there’s Michael dancing in his bathrobe, and yes he’s right to give warning about that, but the music is very snappy and I think it’s a very good introduction to you know, the meat or the “meal” of the thing. But when the music and dancing is over and Michael starts to talk, in one very small second the kid says “do it again!” and I say, but it hasn’t really started yet, it still has to finish. But he throws a little fit and is near tears and so I start it again and Michael dances again and Gary’s music plays and when that’s done the kid says “do it again!” And I say but Michael is going to talk now and he says “I don’t want Michael to talk!” So I had to play the first, what, ten seconds over about twenty times. And so I guess if my kid could hook himself up to an Experience Machine, those ten seconds would be on it. At least twenty times.
This came from my friend Mickle today. It had the subject line “the critic has spoken.” I told Mickle that his kid is a metaphor for America.
I can’t tell if my bed smells. It might. Earlier today I walked in and noticed how stale it smells in here. I was sick for five days and so the room smells like a place where someone was sick.
Soon after walking in, I stopped smelling anything. It’s only when you first encounter something that you are able to experience it. When I read over something I’m writing, something I haven’t looked at in a while, I see it clearly and know exactly what works. But then if I read it through a second time, I have no idea, I’ve lost all perspective.
I was the one to find the back door open. We had just returned from the swim club, and at first I thought my brother had forgotten to shut the door. Then I saw the glass on the rug and the broken window.
When the policeman came, my mother told me and my brother to go outside and play. Instead of playing, we sat on the curb and stared at the police car in front of our house. There had never been a police car in front of anyone’s house. My friend Richard came over and asked why the police car was there, so I told him. He seemed impressed. I added that the burglars had thrown all the drawers on the floor.
That night my brother woke me to say he’d heard strangers in the house. I told him this wasn’t true, but he insisted I go downstairs and check. There wasn’t anyone there. This same scene was repeated, night after night, for several weeks. I would be asleep in my room and my brother would come in and say he’d heard strangers in the house. “But there aren’t,” I would say, and he’d say, “No, I heard them.” I’d remind him of all the other times he supposedly heard them, and he’d say, “I really heard them this time.”
Then one night it was over. My brother stopped waking me. It was as though it never happened.
Years later, I’ve forgotten the circumstance now, my mother confessed to the crime. We were destitute at the time—my father had stopped providing child support—so my mother staged the burglary to collect the insurance money. Her boyfriend helped her do it.
I remember him. His name was Phil and he had a lot of body hair. I liked him best of all my mother’s boyfriends, then or ever. He was nice without being phony.
I asked my mother if she’d told my brother yet, and she sort of looked at her hands. It turns out she told my brother when we were kids. She had no choice. Before waking me, he would wake her, and she’d be the one to walk through the house in the dark. Afterwards, she would lie in bed and listen as he crept down the hall and opened the door to my room.
In S’s hometown, Zell am See, she showed me the place, high in the mountains, where her father crashed his two-seater plane and died. A plaque was nailed to a tree.
Later, together with her mother, we hiked through the same mountains, picking mushrooms. S taught me which ones are edible. I have a photo from that day that shows me holding a mushroom I’ve just picked, S’s mother by my side. Over her right shoulder, far below us, you can see the town and the lake.
Imagine an enormous bowl, too wide to see across, that’s spinning, much like the earth, in two ways at once: around its own axis, and in orbit of a point outside itself. You are inside the bowl as it spins, held by centrifugal force against its inner wall, which is made of a material too slippery to grasp. Others are with you, strangers. As the spinning slows, you fall closer and closer to the center of the bowl. There is a hole there, at the bottom, through which everyone will fall. That hole is the point of the ride.
This morning, over oatmeal, K and I brainstormed impossible and offensive taglines. It began with the brown sugar. The current Domino tagline reads “We’ll always be your sugar.” I suggested they change this, at least for the brown sugar, to “How come you taste so good?” but K convinced me it would be better as “Just like a black girl should.”
Picture it. “Domino Brown Sugar: Just like a black girl should.” All hell would break loose.
The back story is that Domino, a family-run business, is inherited by a lunatic. All but one of the top executives quit after they hear what he wants printed on the brown sugar boxes. The one remaining executive, desperate to prove how insane the idea is, conducts a secret focus group in which consumers are asked to choose between the old and new taglines. No one selects “Just like a black girl should,” and several participants storm out in disgust, leaving behind their coupons for a free case of Domino brown sugar. None of this sways the lunatic, however, and the boxes are printed.
At this point, K and I got bored of brown sugar and switched to bananas. It only took me a minute to come up with the winning tagline, but before I reveal what it is, you have to promise to imagine a world in which this phrase appears on a little sticker affixed to every banana you buy.
Did you just promise? Thank you. The sticker says “Happy to See You.”
Three from my inbox:
Sunday night C went to a screening of experimental films from the early ’70s in the “structuralist, minimalist” vein (I think I got that right). “Flicker” was 30 minutes of a flickering screen, white and black alternating. Instead of walking out, which is what she wanted to do, she put her coat over her head so she could stay and see the films that followed.
*
You are a good boyfriend. I would not have gone to an Eve Enstler play. Then again I didn’t have the previous positive Eve Enstler experience to go on. I never would have to gone to that either. I assume a girl brought you. Lest you think I don’t like anything girly, I misted up during the Girlmore Girls last night, and right now I’m watching America’s Next Top Model.
Misting up during the Gilmore Girls should be mentioned in your next online profile.
Negatory. I can’t clue women in to how emotionally malleable I am!
Perhaps you could juxtapose this with something manly and emotionally imposing. All I know is that Gilmore Girls misting, once revealed, is going to get you a lot of tail.
*
I’m a teacher and today in class one of my students was crawling around on all fours, so I was like what the hell and started to crawl around with him. Then after a while I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand me cause he doesn’t speak English (which is what I’m supposed to be teaching him), “Man this is a waste of time, so if you don’t do or say something interesting then it’s back to the flashcards for you, mister.” Right then he froze, turned his head ever so slowly toward me and said, “Eat pooh.” He’s four years old.
Her letter lies unopened on the kitchen table. He doesn’t know what it says, and so it could say almost anything. This remains true until he opens it, when all possibilities dissolve into a single reality.
Right now he doesn’t want that to happen, which is strange in a sense because his last thought before opening the mailbox was of how much he wanted her letter to be inside, of how long he had waited, of how even bad news would be better than no news because at least it would be news.
One hears of people who avoid certain tests for fear they may have the disease. The logic is familiar: until one receives confirmation one way or another, one doesn’t have anything. This is despite the fact that the test changes nothing: one either does or doesn’t have the disease. Similarly her letter already says what it says, and his delay changes nothing.
He’s held off until now (this is what he tells himself) to give himself time to prepare, by which he means, prepare for the worst.
At the moment he finally begins to read, he will step into an unknown room, one in which nearly anything is possible, although some things are more likely than others. For now he sits outside that room, in a kind of waiting area, readying himself.
There’s a film I star in. It’s called Michael Barrish Screen Test. I’ve never seen it, but people tell me it’s good.
The story is this. A few years ago my friend Ross, a filmmaker, sent me an email saying what a big hit I was at a certain film screening. He didn’t mention Michael Barrish Screen Test, which I knew nothing about anyway, so I had no idea what he was talking about. Still, his email made me happy. I was a big hit! At a certain film screening! I responded with an email saying, “It’s about time.” I didn’t ask Ross to explain my success, and he never did. A year or so later, a mutual friend told me about Michael Barrish Screen Test, and the mystery was solved.
It turns out that the film was intended as a screen test for a feature-length film that never got made. I believe Ross shot it in 1993, while we were both living in Oakland. From what I remember being told, the film simply consists of me telling the same story twice. Naturally I’ve forgotten what story I tell (in fact I can hardly remember anything about the experience), but I assume my story must have related to the theme of Ross’s unmade film, which unfortunately I’ve forgotten as well. Sadly, the only thing I remember about that film is that I was to star in it, which seemed crazy to me at the time, because whatever I am, I’m no actor.
I mention this now because I never want to see Michael Barrish Screen Test. My reason? Not seeing the film leaves me free to imagine it any way I want. Once I see it, I’m stuck with whatever it is, that film only, and all the films I might otherwise imagine are gone, obliterated; or to use a term from quantum mechanics, collapsed.
It’s the tyranny of the real.
I want to keep the film alive, as I think of it, although the film I’m keeping alive is not Ross’s but mine. Nor is it only one film. It is all the films called Michael Barrish Screen Test I’ve imagined and may yet imagine. These exist only so long as the real film, the one shot by Ross, remains unknown.
Possibility is voluptuous.
A friend told me on the sly that a girl we both knew, Debbie, was claiming that she and I had made out at Penny Sue Gold’s party. This was a lie. I hadn’t said three words to Debbie and certainly hadn’t kissed her.
I didn’t know what to do. On the one hand I wanted justice, I wanted the truth known by everyone in our circle of friends: I hasn’t kissed Debbie and wouldn’t have kissed Debbie because… well, because Debbie was tall and awkward and not very pretty (all of which everyone already knew of course, but those were the reasons). On the other hand, I had no desire to humiliate Debbie, who was a sweet girl and who after all had chosen me among all boys in our circle for the lie—a fact that hadn’t escaped my notice.
Looking back, Debbie’s lie may have been less flattering than I assumed. After all, had she claimed to have made out with, say, the hunky Mark Goodman, her friends would have laughed at her. I was a believable choice. Or maybe the lie was genuine, maybe Debbie liked me and chose me for that reason. It’s even possible she told the lie knowing I would hear about it, or least hoping I would.
I’ll never know which of these possibilities was true because I never spoke about it with Debbie, or with anyone for that matter. Instead I moved away, for unrelated reasons, and the problem disappeared.
I met Stacey at a dance party in Penny Sue Gold’s basement. I was fourteen. We danced a slow dance and she put her leg between mine, rubbing my crouch in rhythm to the music.
At first I had no idea what she was doing. None of the girls I knew would ever do such a thing—it wouldn’t have occurred to them, nor would it have occurred to me to want them to do it; it was an act beyond our mutual conception. However all this changed as I came to realize that what Stacey appeared to be doing, incredible as it seemed, was exactly what she was doing.
Unfortunately I can’t remember how the dance ended or what we said to each other immediately after, assuming I managed to speak. Instead my next memory is of breathlessly telling my best friend David what had happened. He wasted no time asking Stacey to dance. When he returned, red-faced, he reported that she had done the same thing to him. Evidently it was how she danced.
Later, sitting on the couch with Stacey, she told me she lived in the suburbs, an impossibly far distance away. She was Penny Sue Gold’s cousin and had been driven to the party by her mother. I knew I would never see her again.
In memory she has become my ex-girlfriend, S. When I try to picture the girl in my arms that night, I see S, although I met S twenty-three years after dancing with Stacey. Because of this persistent confusion, I’ve often wondered if my “type” was imprinted that night in Penny Sue Gold’s basement, just at the moment, emblazoned now in memory, Stacey glided her leg between mine.
I’ve decided to write something new on Oblivio every day for the next 100 days.
This is probably a stupid idea, another in a series of self-made prisons, but stupid or not, it’s still an idea—something I haven’t had, or haven’t bother to have, in some time.
I do have a few stories to tell. For example I’m working on a series called Girls I Never Kissed. This should keep me busy for a while, given the number of girls who qualify.
How many is that? Several billion.
Of course if you count the dead, the numbers go up. According to the calculations of Tom Ramsey at the University of Hawaii, approximately 96,100,000,000 people had lived on the earth as of the year 2000, roughly half of whom, one presumes, were female.
That’s a lot of lips to have never kissed, for one reason or another.
But then I think: Someone did, most likely.
It’s a happy thought.
A man signs a shovel and so he digs.
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