Scream (18 page)

Back then, even if you couldn't afford a painting or an artwork, you still got to mingle and it was a party. And there were peculiar nightclubs, and the people at the art opening would say, “Are you going to—” and name a place, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Save the Robots, Beulah Land, Area, the Pyramid Club, whatever was going on at the time, with performances and music. It was all just a big scene. I always thought it too bad that I had missed the 1960s in New York.

I didn't realize how unique or special the times were that I was living in now, the eighties.

You could be broke but still have an amazing life. People were still able to find really cheap apartments, not that you would necessarily want to live in them. An old hotel had been converted into apartments and somehow a guy I knew was able to rent the coat checkroom. It had a great address downtown, but of course a coat checkroom is small, it doesn't have windows, and I think there was a toilet but no shower. That was his home.

Even so, I don't know how anybody ever made money to pay rent. A place might cost five or six hundred dollars, but a lot of people displayed no visible signs of employment. Did everyone but me have a family who sent them money?

I had a job writing for a downtown newspaper. I wrote funny little articles, reviewing art shows or clubs or events. I got paid twenty bucks an article, not enough to survive on—and then they fired me! The next week I was on the cover of
New York
magazine. That was an odd transformation. My book
Slaves of New York
wasn't in any stores because the publisher hadn't printed many copies. I was broke and paranoid, except now when I went someplace and people started whispering, I wasn't being paranoid. They were actually whispering.

Then the trend—art being something cutting edge—changed. The gallery spaces cost so much for the dealers to rent, they had to sell art for a lot of money and they only wanted rich people in their galleries.

After that, for a while, fashion shows became the social event.

Going to a fashion show is fun the first few times. Then you realize: I can't afford the clothes even if I do think they are pretty. And most of them are only pretty because they are being worn by a beautiful six-foot-tall twenty-year-old girl. If I wore a pair of baggy silk shorts and a blouse with one long sleeve and one bare shoulder with a large lumpy knot in the back just at the base of the spine in turquoise with beige spots, it would not look good. And if I wore six-inch platform shoes I would fall over.

The clothes cost thousands and thousands of dollars and the main objective is for people to say they attended the show. The people who go to the shows in New York City are all dressed quite boringly, usually in black, and would never wear the things that are being worn by the models onstage.

So the people watching isn't all that fun, either. The front row might have some familiar faces of magazine editors or one or two celebrities or a department store buyer. There might be a “writer” who once wrote a tiny book of “funny” essays thirty years ago that no one has ever read but is so short people think they read it and remember it was funny. There are people who are “important” and other people take their pictures with cell phones or try to stop them for a mini-interview for some fashion channel. The other people are like, “So-and-so was there, and so-and-so.”

The other rows are filled with junior editors and PR people. They are sitting there talking on their cell phones, texting and tweeting, to say who is there and that they are at such and such a show—but the whole time there is a general rage that they are not seated in the important first row. Then you wait and you wait and you wait and then there is very loud music and some girls or boys come out wearing these different outfits. Then it is over.

You just sit there and you think, Ooo, pretty.

Even if I could buy it, I would get a stain on it or it would make me look dumpy or whatever. You might as well be one of a school of fish or a bunch of sparrows. I don't really like the job of sitting there as an unpaid interested audience member. I mean, I will be an audience member, but pay me. Or give me a dress.

my mom gets a job and a real home

E
ventually my mom got a job. Because she wrote poetry, A. R. Ammons selected her to come to Cornell University. She was fifty years old.

My mother lived on a small private road just off the college campus. It was a historic district. You couldn't touch or change anything on the house unless it was done according to historic code. This made it hard to keep her house warm. Her house had windows with crisscross wood that formed diamond panes, very old and good at keeping in the cold.

The place was basically air-conditioned in summer, only there was no air-conditioning. In winter, it was so air-conditioned I had to stop visiting her, after I took out my contact lenses and put them in their case and left them on the windowsill overnight. In the morning, when I got up, the contact lenses had frozen into two little chunks of ice.

There were a few other charming houses on my mom's street in Ithaca. One had been a chicken coop, another had been a barn. Everyone knew each other on this little block, and because it was a private road, the neighborhood had to gang up together to pay for private snowplowing or to get the garbage collected.

There were a lot of rules about garbage. Garbage night was a big night. The garbage company came at around 4
A
.
M
. to get the garbage. You had to prepare the garbage carefully or you got in trouble. Days before the event, my mother began talking about it. “We have to get the garbage ready. It has to be perfect.”

Initially I thought she was overreacting. The next day I went out to check. This was slapped on the bin:

If you made a mistake you got this Day-Glo warning stuck on the garbage, which was now strewn around in front—to teach you a lesson. You knew you were in a university town because the garbage collector took the time to write
BAGS MUST HAVE FORTITUDE
. He probably had a degree. I wouldn't be able to be a garbage collector in that town. If I were collecting garbage at 3 or 4
A
.
M
. and there was this terrible violation, I would write
BAG BROKE
.

There were even bigger enforcement threats this garbage company could level on you. If your garbage was incorrect—in any way—and they were feeling generous, you were issued just the warning, but after that, you got a ticket. A garbage ticket carried serious penalties with it. And so, Monday morning, it was always with some trepidation that you went out to check whether the garbage had been accepted and carried away. Or you would find a warning, a ticket, or the garbage flung back at the house.

My mom lived on that block for thirty years. Once, there had been a big mansion, but it had been torn down to make apartments. The houses that were left on that block had been part of the original estate. My mom, for example, was living in the “gatekeeper's cottage.” For a lot of years, a family we called the Beautiful Family lived next door to her in the “gardener's cottage.” They were all beautiful, those Nolan-Wheatleys. There was the handsome English husband who had grown up in Singapore and taught Chinese, the beautiful mother from New Orleans who had grown up in a vampire-style mansion, which was later used as a set in films.

In any southern Gothic horror movie set in New Orleans, to this day, you can see that house. The Beautiful Family didn't personally own it—it belonged to the larger consortium of the Beautiful Family's mother. Her big southern family had grown up there, all of them inheriting a fraction or portion of the spoils, and they now all reaped the benefits of having had to live in a place crawling with cockroaches and the ghosts of slaves.

And then there were their four beautiful daughters. They all took ballet, although one might have played the piano—not sure. These four daughters had long hair; you know what I'm talking about? Tresses? Dark, flowing tresses?

The Beautiful Family would have us over and serve real lemonade in a glass pitcher, sometimes in the yard, made out of fresh-squeezed lemons. The yard was small and lovely, full of fragrant flowers, that kind of thing, and when this beautiful family sat out there, the handsome father with his English accent, chatting away in Chinese to himself, and the mother with her lovely New Orleans drawl, not imbibing any alcoholic beverages, and those four daughters just twirling away, on pointe, with their hair flowing, you felt privileged to know them.

Everyone on the block used to know each other and they had parties and get-togethers. It was very sad when the Beautiful Family left, and Bernice (she lived in the “old barn”) went to a nursing home and then died, and Tony (the “chicken coop”) moved, etc. But my mom was so happy to be living in such a nice house, on this pleasant street, and to be a professor at Cornell.

After the Beautiful Family left there were a few other residents next door. Then, some time later, a new couple moved in. In the yard I met the new neighbor.

“Hi,” he said over the fence.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “It's nice to meet you.”

“I have a daughter. She's my
biological
daughter. I used to live next door to her mother and her girlfriend. They were trying to get pregnant but they couldn't. They kept saying, ‘If this takes any longer, we're going to go and blow up a sperm bank!' ‘I'm here for you,' I told them. The three of us had only one kid before they got their operations. Then they got married and her parents disowned them. My daughter doesn't live with me but she comes here to visit. Is Willow your only child? Did you ever think of having more?”

“Oh, I'm okay,” I said.

It was, for me, maybe kind of too much information. But still the neighbors seemed nice enough.

He was busy redoing the garden of fragrant flowers where the Beautiful Family had formerly entertained by serving nonalcoholic beverages. Pretty soon he had blocked off the street with a few tons of stone and was busy paving over the backyard and putting up a large shed, right by the property line.

Eventually, he planned to use this shed as a small private museum for his wife's collection of salt and pepper shakers. She had more than two thousand salt and pepper shakers and nowhere to display them, until he built her this storage shed on the property line, which, along with a lot of building materials, wheelbarrows, and piles of cement that they kept there, created a very sturdy barricade and arresting visual.

You know, you have neighbors. In the country, they do things like that, slapping up a building right on the property line without a permit, and what are you going to do? You keep your mouth shut and try to get along.

They were good people. When I went out to garden, it was hard work. It was hot. I had to pull up weeds. Then the neighbor appeared. He tried to help. He shouted, “You look stressed! You should take up meditation.”

I did not want to get angry with the neighbor. I did not want to explain to him, if you are gardening you don't need to take up meditation, it
is
a form of meditation.

As soon as I tried to get some kind of yard work done, he would appear to remind me to meditate. I had been perfectly calm and peaceful until I got the meditation command, but you can't start shouting back, “I don't NEED to meditate! I don't WANT to meditate! I WON'T meditate!”

When I had calmed down a bit he came and leaned over the fence. “Feeling any calmer now?”

That was what it was, I guess, to have a neighbor up there. You are more careful about your privacy when you live in a city apartment. You don't get involved with your apartment neighbors if you can help it. In the city, only a wall separates you. Here, there was a little yard.

I saw him on the street by the house, when I had taken the bus up from the city. He was walking his dog, and when he saw me he opened his arms in a wide embrace.

I hugged him back. “Hi!”

“Ooo, what's going on here?” he mumbled in my ear and pressed up against me. “That's quite a greeting.” How could I hug him in a friendly response ever again? Maybe he would say he got definite “vibes” from me. But there were no vibes! To me, if a man has a ponytail but is bald on top, I am not giving him any vibes. I don't like ponytails, not on men; that's my own problem.

I was sitting in a hanging chair that was on the side porch. The neighbor was walking with his wife and dog. “You look like you are sitting in a sex chair!” he shouted.

I winced. What was a sex chair, anyway? Now I could never sit in that hanging chair again.

ithaca is the wrong place

I
'm just trying to explain why I thought it was better for me to sell my mom's house, after I couldn't look after her at home, and go somewhere without people nearby. I just could not keep out of trouble, I could not keep doing bad things. I was on the bus again in the middle of the day, headed back from the city, when I got a call from the police. “We got a call from your neighbors, saying your dogs are barking.”