Friday, October 8, 2010
And I’m thinking, “If I just stay in the moment, I’m okay.”
Friday, October 8, 2010
I didn’t want to walk down the old streets yesterday.
I had what I thought was a meeting, which turned out to be a “social lunch,” and I was freaking out the whole time because talking without an agenda with strangers is precarious. I was conscious that I was smiling and enthusing a lot – “Ah, water, wonderful. Fabulous. Wonderful, a cheese grater. Great.” – and by the time I left I was cursing myself for grinning like an idiot.
I’d been nervous on my way down, thinking about Joan Didion as I passed my old place on Fourth Avenue, which reminds me of my dead cats, Fang and Petunia, and how many things I fucked up while I lived there. These days I’m trying to shun the landmarks, stop mistaking them for mine (or mines), but there are so many; every block has its history. I’ve been here so long.
The lunch was on Eldridge Street. I deliberately took Forsythe, because it’s not as bad. I don’t want it, I don’t want the old associations. I’m done with being that person, and if I can’t do anything to help her, I want her to stop chasing me down, in her dirty white shirt and ripped tights, indignant about something.
I just want to go somewhere today, me, Janice Erlbaum, 41 years old, credible adult, happily partnered, published author, teacher – nay, ed-u-ca-tor – noted philanthropist (as in “a lover of mankind,” HAH) – just, like, deal with today, just deal with feeling nervous and not good enough in advance of the lunch; deal with trying to walk down the street where the construction site has red mud pouring into the gutters like the Danube; singing Mary J. Blige to myself; occasionally apologizing out loud or muttering the words, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m a good person,” which I try to pass off as lyrics.
And I’m thinking, “If I just stay in the moment, I’m okay.”
I take some deep breaths and try to be all Gurdjieff and The Fourth Way about it and notice everything inside and around me with complete attention: the warehouse with the front gate open and the man sitting on a bucket and shelling peas in front, the ambulance across the street, every sound and every sensation, which lasted under five seconds, and then I was thinking ahead to class on Sunday and how I was going to tell everybody to be in the moment, and what great advice this was going to be. So there I was in the future, and the moment was gone.
And then I hit Stanton, and I was back in the past. It just came around the corner, the way it did sometimes back in the 80s, just ran up on you and fucked your shit up out of nowhere for no reason (see: J. Dean in the park, the skinheads at Westbeth, the night outside Sophie’s on 5th Street when those guys jumped our guys and I stood there yelling, “Stop it! Stop!”). (See also: getting mugged at gunpoint with Simon on Park Place in Brooklyn at ten o’clock on Oscars Night 1989, huddling on the sidewalk in the plane crash position listening to them hit him with a pistol, indignant that this was how it was going to go down, so stupid and infuriating, that I was that I wasn’t going to get to live the rest of my life).
So, mugged by memory, struggling down the street. I finally cut down on the meds so I feel less like I’m swimming, less like I’m in a dream where my legs are so heavy I have to drag myself along with my hands, when other times I’ve been so light and floating.
Baring my teeth and enthusing like a bull throughout lunch, which was – why do I choose to say the things I say sometimes? But why does anyone? My two companions were as stressed as me, I’ll wager. I just want to do business. Everybody seems to think I want foreplay with this deal; I’d rather just fuck.
Jesus Christ. I use that epithet a lot, especially for a Jew by birth. But I mean it in the Jewish way, in that I’m appealing to a Messiah that has not yet appeared, the divine intelligence who’s supposed to get us all to work together and not be shitheads and advance humanity and all universal life into something everlastingly vast and beautiful. The god I wish existed. That guy.
Anyway, I think the meds are helping, even though I did spend a shame-filled afternoon last week watching Hoarders episodes and jeering at the participants, and then fantasizing about calling Adult Protective Services/the ASPCA/the cops on my mother and her husband. But the urge went away.
But then I have a nightmare, where I’ve come to her place with some friends to clean it up while she and R. are out of town, and it’s not as bad as I thought, though I keep opening drawers and finding live cats sitting in them. Then they come home unexpectedly, and I’m terrified, busted, but then I pull it together and I say okay, I can handle this.
My mother’s wearing her hair in the same Dee-Lite flip she used to wear in her twenties. She makes some offhand wry comment about me overstepping my boundaries, the joke being that I’m a co-dependent who makes everything worse instead of better, and I scream at her full force, pointing my finger in her face. “What business is it of mine? You’ve been living in filth! And I don’t care about how you live. but you have animals, and they didn’t choose to live like this!”
I was talking about her with the new meds guy, and he said, “Even if you haven’t made progress with her, you’ve made progress with yourself. Look at that as a success.”
Okay! I said. And then he gave me more drugs.