Attempting Normal (13 page)

I had an experience that fully illustrates this dichotomy. I was in Montreal at the annual comedy festival, and they have a lot of street performers in Montreal, a lot of buskers I guess is the proper word, a romantic term for mimes and whatnot.

I was walking down the street and there was this huge crowd in the distance, gathered around something. I couldn’t really tell what it was, and as I got closer I saw that they were all looking up at something, but I still wasn’t clear what it was. And as I got closer I could hear them applauding and saw there, in the middle of the crowd, a guy in a clown suit on stilts, juggling. And people were just ecstatic. It was as if Jesus had come back. They were
climbing over each other to put money in his hat. I looked at the spectacle of it and thought, “It’s a fuckin’ clown, you know, do we need another fuckin’ clown?” And then I kept walking down the street and about a block farther on another corner there was a guy playing saxophone. He was just standing there by himself and he was brilliant; he sounded like Coltrane, just blowing his guts out. Huge riffs. His neck looked like it was about to explode. No one was watching. There was like fifty cents in his sax case and a little stack of CDs. I looked up the street and saw a fresh crowd starting to gather around the juggling clown. Meanwhile, this guy’s still blowing his guts out. Then he stops. I look at him and say, “Jesus, man, that was beautiful. Was that Coltrane?” He says, “No, it’s an original, and if you like it so much, why don’t you buy my fuckin’ CD? It’s on there.”

“All right,” I said. I pick up the CD and I look at it.

He says, “It’s cut three.” I turned over the CD. You know what it was called? It was called “Killing the Clown on Stilts.”

At least that’s how I read it.

After the show in D.C. I went back down to the strip bar, but I felt good this time. I thought it would make a difference in my experience of the club, but it didn’t. There was a moment, though, that really moved me. It didn’t happen when a dancer was dancing for me. After each dancer finished on the stage it was her job to wipe down the mirror behind her and the pole before the next dancer came up. I was thinking about how temporary disappointment can be if you don’t linger on it too long and how there are beautiful things in the world if you look. It’s up to you to find them for yourself. I looked up at my missing Vermeer,
Stripper Cleaning Mirror
.

  11  

The night I broke the orange chair was the night I realized my marriage to Mishna was really on the ropes. My rage transformed a piece of furniture into garbage and my wife into a terrified hostage. The final blow was when I told the story onstage.

Mishna and I had bought the chair on the street when we were furnishing our new house. There was a little white-haired man who sporadically sold used furniture out of a storage locker on Hollywood Boulevard near Western Avenue. There’s a line of old garage doors that runs along the bottom of a building and sometimes he would be set up in front of an open one with his stuff out on the sidewalk. He was out there on Sundays, some Sundays.

We always rubbernecked his wares from the car. When we drove by he was always busy moving things around, rearranging. It seemed that there was an ever-evolving order to it all in his mind. He was a curator of the selected sellable detritus of other people’s lives.

One day we were driving by and saw a clown painting on the
street. It looked like one of those classic old housewife hobby-painted clown heads in a cheesy wooden frame. We had to stop for the clown. We got out of the car and I walked quickly toward the painting, which was propped against the wall. I panic in yard sale and buffet situations. Even though there was no one else there looking at it I didn’t want it to be snatched up. I always think I am going to miss out on a deal or some kind of food.

The painting was top-notch kitschy crap.

“Hello, excuse me. How much is this clown?” I asked the little man, who seemed to be looking for something in the garage.

He stopped rummaging and turned around. He looked confused and wise simultaneously, like a sweet cranky wizard or a midlevel hobbit.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a nice piece,” he said, looking at it as if he had never really considered selling it. I wasn’t clear whether that was his technique or his actual sentiment.

“I guess I can do one twenty-five.”

“Seventy-five,” my wife said.

He wrestled with the number on his face and did some hand scratching.

“Okay, one hundred,” the wizard said.

“Sold!” I said preemptively, given my wife’s look.

I was always impressed with her gumption but in that moment I fought it. I am not a good haggler. I don’t like the game of it. I usually just pay what they ask for. I don’t want to engage with the charade unless I don’t care if I own what I am haggling for. There is a weird truth to the idea that if you really don’t care, things will generally go your way. If you’re really invested and emotionally attached, things will get away from you or at least get chaotic and scary. That’s been my experience with relationships.

“You need anything else?” he asked, like we were putting him out. I began to wonder if he actually sold stuff or he just took the stuff out of the garage every so often to assess what he had.

“Yeah, we need a chair,” I said.

He led us over to a beautiful modern Danish chair. It was curvy, with wooden sides and an orange leather seat and backrest. My wife loved it. It was going to be hers for her office in the house. It was probably from the forties, maybe the fifties; old but not fragile.

It shouldn’t have broken as easily as it did.

“I love it,” she said. “How much?”

“Uh, I don’t know. It’s the only one I have.”

He seemed to want to hold on to everything we asked him about.

I said, “I’ll give you one-fifty.”

I shouldn’t have started the negotiating. My wife gave me the “you should’ve let me handle this” look again.

“I don’t know. That’s a one of a kind. You know, I don’t think I want to part with it.”

I was pissed but I didn’t care. I said, “Two hundred.”

He said, “Yeah, okay, but take care of it. I’ve never seen one like that. It’s a special chair.”

“No problem,” I snapped.

It seemed he really wanted his artifacts to be with the right people. I might have underestimated him at the time. He might have had a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and objects than the rest of us do. An odd pairing between a chair and a couple might disrupt the trajectory of the lives of the people and the chair. Of course, anything can be backloaded with meaning. That’s how we explain things away when we don’t want to take full responsibility for actions that are frightening and disastrous. It’s the core of mysticism.

My wife was happy. She loved it. I was happy and felt like I had manned up to the moment. I had done it wrong but it still only cost me two hundred dollars.

“Anything else you’re looking for? Or can I get on with my day?”

“We need curtains but I guess you don’t really have that kind of stuff.”

“I’ve got a lot more stuff that I haven’t gone through. I do have some curtains but I don’t know if they’re for sale. Let’s have a look.”

The little man had kind of a hobble to his walk. We followed him to the garage locker door one down from the open one. He labored with a ring of keys and unlocked the white wooden doors and pulled them both open to reveal a massive mound of tables, chairs, lamps, paintings, and fabrics. Everything was piled on top of everything else. There was no way to walk around or check stuff out. It was a chaos mound of groovy treasure. My wife and I looked at each other like we had just been led into the cavern of cool truth.

We were excited, a secret stash. This all could have been part of his method. He lured curious people into his web of antique trash and made them feel like they were the first to lay eyes on the mid-century booty. As it turns out, the whole encounter became very mind-altering. I had no idea what was about to happen.

“I have some curtains up there. Can you see them?”

There was a huge unruly bundle of what looked to be the ugliest curtains in the world. My wife and I looked at each other.

“I don’t know if those will work. Thanks for showing us,” she said.

“Yeah, I don’t think I can sell them.”

Of course you don’t, I thought.

“They were in Carl Jung’s office,” he said, flatly.

He must have seen me coming. He was an empath. He understood my uncapped personality, my propensity toward improvising the mystical, and hanging hope and power on inanimate objects.

“Carl Jung was in Los Angeles. How did I not know that?”

It seemed way too random to be bullshit. Suddenly, in my mind
those curtains were an aperture for a room where a master sat doing the big work. The very mind that helped establish the fact that we are innately propelled toward something bigger than ourselves, and that spirituality is a primal deep craving based on universal archetypes that lay within the historical soul of the human experience. He invented the idea of the collective unconscious, for fuck’s sake. He realized that synchronicity was real, in an almost magical way, relative to our perception, connections, and the power of meaning. I pictured him opening those curtains to let the day in, mandalas of pipe smoke surrounding him, as the great genius gazed out into the light.

“We have to have those curtains!” I blurted.

“They don’t really fit the house,” my wife said.

“Yeah, I’m not sure if I want to sell them.”

The wizard decided I wasn’t ready for the Jungian curtains. He was reluctant about the chair, too. Why was he judging me? What did he see within me? I was reading too much into it.

I paid the man. We loaded the chair and clown into the car and headed home.

I thought about those curtains for weeks. I thought about how they would change my life because they were saturated with unused Jung thoughts. I just needed to wring them out. Perhaps I could make a robe out of them, several robes. I could’ve created an entire line of Jungwear.

Then I did some research on Jung in L.A. Turns out it was highly unlikely that those curtains ever came in contact with the man. They were probably just in an office at the Jung Institute. I was disappointed and something died, maybe the dream of achieving a Jungian breakthrough via curtains.

I don’t think those curtains could have stopped the emotional momentum of unmanaged cycles of primal rage in my marriage. I’m not sure anything could. Patterns had been set. My anger was unaddressed despite the damage it was causing. I just never
thought it was a real problem, because when I was finished being angry I was done, every time. If you are a rager, when you are done raging you feel relief. It is out of you. It’s like masturbating, only it’s toxic to others and much harder to clean up. But even if the rager feels done, the rage will have generated in the other person a contempt that festers and swells, even if unspoken. Because the other person is afraid to speak.

The truth is that if you are ever yelling at a woman it doesn’t matter what it is about because 95 percent of the time you should just be screaming, “Why can’t you be my mommy? Why?” Or, “Why can’t you be a better mommy than my mommy?” The other 5 percent is probably justified but there are other ways to communicate than yelling, I am told.

By the time the fight took place the orange chair was well established in my wife’s office room. It had been over a year since we bought it. The clown had found its place on the wall in the bathroom. To this day when I look at myself in the mirror the sad clown is there looking down at me. That’s as good a metaphor for my relationship with a god as I can come up with.

The reason for the fight was not specific. Once a fight starts it really doesn’t matter what it is about, anyway. I know we were lying in bed. I was festering about something she hadn’t done, or that she’d done, or that in my opinion she should have done, or that she might do if I didn’t say something. I also knew we had made it through a day and I probably didn’t need to say anything to fuck that up. Let me put it this way: There was absolutely no reason for me to say anything other than to start a fight. I was just one of those sick people who doesn’t know if someone loves them unless the other person is crying. The fight began in my head.