White Girls (37 page)
An out-of-work actress is a terrible thing to see. They’re always acting bright, ready, and available, because they’re trying to seduce men—writers, directors, and so on—who can claim them and put their bodies and imaginations to work. Longing to be claimed, an out-of-work actress is always trying not to show her true desperation. They act more “girlish” than they would ordinarily, just to get some dick interested. That kind of girlishness always comes out as brittle tasting. You can smell their fear: about getting old, tits falling, work drying up. If you’re not working, you can take classes, think about plastic surgery, do stuff that makes you think you’re doing something. But what if you’re an actress with no kind of access to show business? Auditions and the like? Take it from me.
An actress is a liar. An actress’s soul is whatever you’re paying
her to shape it as at the time. Why do men fall for it? I can spot an actress a mile away—and then avoid her. I don’t suppose it’s because men like you find some general truth about women under the tits and feathers, is it? Look at all those men around Mary Tyrone—her two sons and husband—drinking themselves to death, waiting for her to be different, waiting for her to become less of a junkie and more of a mother. Why did they do that? Why did Gary? Can’t Mary’s sons and husband see that actress, junkie, mother—it’s all the same? That all those roles are fueled by self-regard and self-pity? What kind of hope do men find underneath all that acting? Are you hoping that one day she’ll stop acting and love you as herself forever? You might as well give that idea up. A mother doesn’t give that part up until God yells “Cut!” Neither does a junkie. Neither does an actress. The hope you all have that women will act differently—somewhere, somehow—is just that: your hope. Actresses are themselves, if only they had one. Women are themselves, if only they could stop acting.
THE WALL SURROUNDING
memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries, clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go those who want to remember clearly or don’t. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair and minds that—if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully—speak a shared language, remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial: What a horrible memory, and so forth. Regardless of where many of us believe we land—in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much—we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events—love, shopping, and so forth—but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?
Against that wall, which is clean and wide and high, we fall disastrously at times, when we can no longer be—quite—the fascist-minded custodians of our past that we’d like to be, as in: I don’t remember, I can’t, and so forth. In censoring our past we censor ourselves—a not remarkable observation; nor is the idea that the will to censorship begins, like some weird music, in the home, heard most acutely by the children, or the queer children someone’s mother must love most. Not remembering, or misremembering one’s childhood is a way of allowing oneself the notion that the past does not exist, that it was not lived through in quite that way, that somehow it did not make one different than the rest, as in, I was the one in hellish bliss wearing my mother’s garters behind the closed door, not being a boy; or, I was in my childhood bed with her and our legs were entwined and young ladies are supposed to keep their legs away from one another, and closed, and so forth.
Some of us regard these memories as accidents, which is for the best if what we want is to forget them. But we condemn ourselves to self-disgust if we insist on not remembering, because memory’s always there, no matter what.
Something else happens in the process of falling, again and again, against the clean, wide, and high wall of misremembering or not remembering at all. With the blood that eventually appears as the result of this repeated violence to the self, one attempts to write one’s name—with a finger, or nearly broken tongue—but can barely make it out after doing so, it’s just too late, as in, That is the way my parents spell my name, I believe, but I cannot pronounce it, and so forth.
For as long as my memory can remember, I existed characterless,
within no memory at all. Or if I did exist it was in remembering the text of someone else’s life—that is, in the devouring of biography. If there was a general rule to my thinking then it was: This is someone else and it is not me so I will remember this because of that; or: The subject’s having done this means that I need not—no life bears repeating; or: This takes me out of what I am—a self. It was never, ever about a self that belonged to me—that is, myself—which for so long I dreamt did not belong to me, because it didn’t. Or maybe doesn’t still.
Here is his story: Once upon a time there was this boy who did not have breasts, but he saw them on nearly everyone in his family, men included. Often he would bury his face in his mother’s breasts, feeling no distance and great distance from her and them all at the same time. This was before he spoke much; his mother was in the distance of speech—brown like that, and all engrossing. They lived in this world just on the other side of speech, where reflection lives inside of reflection, until one day this boy, who in looks and manner had often, favorably, been compared to a girl, was in the subway with his mother. While there, this boy and his mother saw two people they recognized from their neighborhood: an older woman who was the mother of a son too, and who was always accompanied by her son, as she was now, underground, except that her son’s appearance in this instance was all different. Almost in direct imitation of his mother, the son was dressed in black shoes with princess heels, and flesh-colored hose through which dark hair sprouted, and a lemon-colored linen shift with grease spots on it, and a purple head scarf, and bangles. He carried a purse with no straps, out of which he removed, after little or no consultation with his mother, a compact and lipstick to dress his
face, too. As the boy and his mother looked at their neighbor and son, the boy’s mother sort of brushed his eyes closed for an instant with the back of her hand and said something he had never heard before but thought he know the meaning of. She said, “Faggot.” This boy never forgot that other boy who wanted so to look like his mother. He did not even forget him after the terror of memory reinstigated this memory—something he had censored from his family because of the way in which his mother had used the word
faggot
in the filth of that underground station, where someone was exercising the courage inherent in being himself.
Here is a terrible memory: The boy who was favorably compared to women was thought to be the same by a man he did not know. This man covered his mouth in a hallway that stank and stank. He removed this boy’s trousers without removing his own, but this man opened and opened his zipper. When he opened his zipper things were very dark and stank and stank in there and felt larger than awful, terrifying and familiar. This man’s hands went to parts of this boy’s body the boy himself had never known. There was something that hurt him very deeply; there were his trousers down around his ankles and there was this man’s hand on his mouth, which was as big as the memory of what his mother had said once in the underground station, and was saying again in his ear or maybe the man was. Together this man and the boy’s mother said the word,
faggot
. For a while this was all the boy remembered, besides the pain and the smell, and his body disappearing. That was the motive behind his body disappearing, and turning all of this into a dream, which it wasn’t.
We often pretend that the profound shame that accompanies our
resistance to remembering is fleeting, as though being revisionists of our own past made much of the difference, as in, “Actually I believe my childhood to have been quite happy. We had a dog, a psychiatrist, a house...” and so forth. But for the child, the queer child some mother must have loved most, this revision of history takes place even before there is a past to be had—it takes place simultaneously with the realization that the parent may pull the following out of his wig or hat: “You are no son/daughter of mine.” To whom do we belong in this ruined kingdom we all want to belong to, regardless of how wrecked, how stultifying? To be central and apparently loved, one will do a great deal, even exercise, continually, the courage of shutting up, the conviction that yes I am just like you and everyone else or at least exhibit the desire to be. At home, in the face of the parent, self-censorship as the entry fee into the ruined kingdom of their existence, of lies and lies again, means a good-bye to the memory of all the cocks and cunts and hearts and minds that we embrace in our mouths, and our hearts, too, but spit out before we give ourselves the chance to name them. If you choose this, all of those others who fly but fall so disastrously against the clean and wide and high wall of memory misremembered may choose not to remember you, too, as the boy who will not love the other boy because he has never loved a boy whose skin was somehow like mud to him; or who will not love anyone because that love means to remember a hate that consumes his heart; or produces such a memory of the mother saying, “What if your father saw you like that?”; or interferes too profoundly with being something other than himself, which is a Jew and beautiful. There are many stories like this one, but only one, too. Such as the story about
the Latvian who died, a white girl no one will ever forget because she not only told the people she cared for they were beautiful and valuable, she told her colored brother, who remains her writer, too. Our recourse in reinventing the love affair with no love, or a surfeit of it, the memory misremembered or tossed altogether, is learning how to write our name—in blood or whatever—on that clean and wide and high wall which only learning to admit oneself to one’s home, recumbent with memory, can destroy.
THANKFULNESS BECAUSE OF:
Walter
D.A.T.
Deborah Treisman—the years, David Remnick—for his Malcolm admiration and Pryor love, Junot: heart.
Profound gratitude to Brent Sikkema, Jean Godfrey-June, and Alexandra Shiva for their beautifully open doors, true hearts, and true shelter.
Then: Ang, J.C., Mr. S.R., and Mrs. S.C.R., George and Gary, Khandi—her voice—and Annie-pants, Miss Phipps, PM Doig, Miss Sarah, Miss Soah, and Miss C.K.N.Y.C.—for the conversations, and saying what needed to be said, for growth.
Love and endless thanks to: Phil Mariani, Ida Panicelli, the late Joe Wood, Tina Brown, Deb Garrison, Gary Smith and the American Academy in Berlin, Bob Silvers, the ever present Barbara Epstein, Thelma Golden, Vendela Vida and Dave Eggers—editors who said the word every writer needs to hear: Yes.
