On Sal Mineo… (an older essay from the first iteration of salmineo.com)

As barely a teenager, Sal Mineo, my uncle, played controversial and important dramatic roles still considered the most nuanced of their era; as Plato in “Rebel Without a Cause,” he was brave and talented enough to offer a conservative post-war audience one of its first lovable, genuine homosexual characters who came across not as a negative stereotype but as a person with honest and tragic conflicts. The results of his on- and off-screen charismatic presence are, of course, well documented; Sarina Mineo, Sal’s sister and my mother, recalls numerous encounters with his fans, including an incident where a woman walked up to him from a crowd and snipped off his necktie. In an entertainment age where being a child star is practically synonymous with eventual drug use, alcoholism, and crime, it is steadying to look at my uncle’s very different experience. When his ‘heartthrob’ status cooled a bit as an adult, Sal did not experience the collapse we’ve seen many former child stars encounter, but instead he continued to stay focused on entertainment in the form of directing. In “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” Sal brought his audience unflaggingly up-close to the severity of life in the prison system; in his version of the play, he refused to circumvent the harsh truth by keeping the final raw scene backstage. Ahead of his time, Sal used the dramatic arts not just to entertain, but also to communicate the complex and imperfect lives of marginalized people in an era before civil rights, before the Stonewall rebellion, when traditional values reigned, and most people had their eyes closed to suffering and difference. Be it the times or the market, but sadly, today such substantive use of the entertainment industry’s now unimaginably vast resources rarely occurs.

Sal, and many of the stars of his era are no longer with us, and at times their grand visions seem misplaced also. Movies like “Exodus” and “Rebel” are so dense that no matter how many times I watch them, I see something new every time; given his endless dynamism, watching his intense and varied movie performances are the best way to know Sal. Though Sal died a year and a half before I was born, I feel I have a sense of him through a mosaic of resources, the most important of whom being my mother. Now 62[sic], she keeps pictures of Sal around the house and is willing to recount stories of their adventures, but still, almost thirty years[sic] after his death, she grieves for him greatly; at the beginning of her adulthood, she lost the person she idolized and who knew her best; briefly a child actor herself, she self-effacingly satirizes the story of a childhood role in a Broadway musical she turned down because Sal hadn’t also been cast. No one misses him more than she and her remaining brother Victor; as the oldest brother, during preparations for Sal’s A and E channel biography presentation, it fell to him to read aloud the eloquent eulogy my father wrote for Sal so many years ago. I have no idea what the time right after his death was truly like for them; I’ve read the newspaper clippings and asked many careful questions, but I didn’t live it. I also see faded Polaroids of my mother, my father, my Aunt Ann and my Uncle Victor holding me as a newborn more than a year later, all smiles; it must have been something of a relief to see a new addition to the family after that unfathomable loss.

Naturally, I feel deprived because I never had a chance to meet him, but it has been wonderful for me to see this website and the expressions of love and respect for Sal from the writers of, and visitors to, the site. My mother, new to computers, has visited the site also, and is equally hopeful for Sal’s star on the walk of fame. She is attempting to collect all of his movies on DVD, and was overjoyed to hear that I’d downloaded a few of the tracks from his brief singing career. Thank you John and Karen, and thank you readers, for cherishing his memory the way my family and I do; it means a lot to us.

Does Your Subconscious Like You? I Bet It Doesn’t.

Last night, I had a dream that I was hanging out with a  friend with whom I’m on the outs. He ended the night early, and left me in a bad neighborhood to find my own way home. I dodged a very West Side Story knife fight (minus the music) and hid by the commuter rail train tracks until first light. I followed the tracks south until I found a station, and was able to board a train heading  home. Then, I somehow managed to single-handedly (and from inside the train), break a trestle bridge that we needed to cross in order to complete the journey. I kept frantically texting my husband, who I knew would be both worried about me and annoyed at my antics.

Seriously? If my subconscious had a driver’s license, it would have a special CDL provision for operating hugely unsubtle, eighteen-wheeled ideas. I want to say to it, Dude, I get it already: this friend will never again be there for me, and is certainly less capable of looking after me than I am capable of looking after myself (how did I know which direction south was in that dream? Because when it got light out, the sun came up in the east, so…).  I also get that I have a tendency to blame myself for the negative outcomes in my relationships, as if maybe everything were my fault, as if I could actually break a whole train bridge with my bare hands, or worse (but cooler), with my mind.

This is by far not my subsconscious’s first offense. When I had a nasty breakup in college, I dreamt about my ex and his new girlfriend literally every night for almost a year. By the end of the year, my brain was running out of new scenarios; one memorable piece of thin material was a dream in which I caught the new couple….brace yourselves….MAKING MACARONI AND CHEESE TOGETHER!  The scandal! After college, when my life was spinning out of control (I was unemployed, living alone in the city, and dating a gay guy; all drama for a different post), I had a six-month run of what I came to call “the 911 dreams,” wherein I would be party to some emergency that would necessitate dialing 911. When I did so, I would naturally be unable to get through, or if I did get through, the emergency would suddenly no longer be an emergency (the infant corpse left on the sidewalk would turn into a newspaper, etcetera). It made me want to jump up and down while yelling duh!

Totally killer contemporary poet Jorie Graham (in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1990) claims that the natural tendency to dream is an essential function of the ability to understand poetry, implying that accepting and interpreting abstractions are skills necessary both to appreciating contemporary poetry and to making sense of dreams. I’m not in the habit of disagreeing with Jorie Graham, and maybe she just has different dreams than I do,  but my dreams are nowhere near as complicated as some of Graham’s own poems. I wish. My dreams don’t reveal anything new; they treat me like I’m stupid, repeating (hell, syndicating) what I already know. When they’re not doing that, they try to re-hook me on a bad habit by glorifying it, or they trick me in to thinking I’ve already solved a problem that I’ve been mulling. Either way, I wake up feeling annoyed and cheated.

It’s disappointing to conclude that my subconscious is such a wasteland, because it limits my sources for revelation. Two weeks ago, I underwent hypnosis to attempt to correct (or at least discover the reasoning for) a troublesome personal failing. Anyone who knows me knows what a long shot this was; hypnosis requires an ability to let go, and calling me a “control freak” would be a generous understatement. I tried to go in to it with an open mind; it wasn’t my fault that the “hypnotist” played cheesy music and read from a script (the real concentration exercise was in not laughing out loud…first I’m supposed to be on a beach, but then, with no segue, I’m supposed to be in a library? Hypnotism scripts don’t leave much room for metacognition…).

But perhaps the major disappointment of the hypnosis wasn’t the amateur status of the practitioner; it was more likely the fact that, if I had been legitimately hypnotized, what I would have found in my subconscious would have been the dregs and the faded billboards, and not the good stuff, the glowing memories and rich connections (that I have, and am capable of). Because, according to my dreams, the archetypes in my subconscious are apparently the threadbare situations I’ve already pondered into irrelevance. My dreams are self-directed schadenfreude, the worst reality television with me in the lead role. They turn precious natural resources into useless widgets; in my dreams, the Wizard of Oz isn’t even a genuine-but-small man, just a trash-collecting machine.

So, hey, subconscious, you admiral of the obvious: enough of the rehashed obsessions, the requiems for the drama; I do all that fine in the daytime. I need enlightenment; I need the apple to fall on my head just right. I’ll be under the tree, waiting.

On Angels

Forget wings: angels are people who reach down to the bottom of themselves to offer love and help, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by them. They come in many shapes, but I never expected them to come in the shape of musicians from a popular London punk band, who hosted me for nearly three weeks one spring in their Bethnal Green flat.

The story begins right around Christmas in 2002, when I began to throw up.  Constantly.  It’s all the weird holiday food, everyone said, and at first, I agreed. But two weeks went by. Then three. Every night, I’d get nauseous, and I’d spend hours in the bathroom of the mouse-infested apartment I shared with my angel of a roommate, Liz, who took constant, competent care of me. Both of us being writers, we’d taken to posting all of our rejection slips on the walls of the bathroom, so, when I still could read during these vomiting episodes, I had entertainment (by the end of the whole thing, I could neither read nor even look at patterns in the floor tiles or on my skull-printed pjs).

A month passed with no change. I saw one doctor after another; no one knew what was wrong. One doctor put me on an anti-nausea drug that worked for a few days until I had a nasty allergic reaction to it (out to coffee with a guy on whom I had an unrequited crush, the muscles in my face froze into a Joker’s smile-grimace; for hours afterward, I assumed that I had just been really happy to see the guy, and not that a dystonic reaction was giving me mock-Parkinson’s. Oops!). An intravenous drug worked, but as soon as it wore off, I was back to throwing up whatever I’d dared eat that day, and I couldn’t live at the hospital; I was in the probationary year of my dream job and couldn’t afford the stigma of sick leave. I had about four good hours each day, which I used to teach my classes and grade papers, and then I would collapse on the couch, or move in to the bathroom for the night.

Another month went by with no change. I lost all my subcutaneous fat and developed an irregular heartbeat, asthma, and neurological problems.  I wore a hole in my couch; I watched the Clay Aiken/Ruben Studdard season of American Idol from beginning to end, for chrissake. None of my five doctors could figure it out, and one finally told me that I ought to make a living will so that my parents wouldn’t have to make any terrible decisions. Thirty miles away, my mother lived with a packed suitcase next to her door. I began to accept that I wasn’t getting any better. The doctors could feed me, and they could keep me from throwing up, but both only intravenously, and not simultaneously. I was angry about how arbitrary it seemed; some no-name thing was threatening my life. I thought with anger about everything I still wanted to do, but might not get to; I couldn’t imagine a time when I’d be healthy enough. The one that rankled the most was Europe: I’d never been.

And one day, at the beginning of April, the vomiting just stopped. I went to bed, dreading the nightly session, but it never came. It didn’t come the next night either, or the night after that.  After a full no-barf week, I began to take stock. I’d lost eighteen pounds on what had become a diet largely consisting  of Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew (a lifesaver) and Whole Foods lime popsicles. I’d run up $6000 in medical bills, mostly for prescriptions, of which my lousy non-group health insurance covered none.  But I felt better. My friend Michael’s family invited Liz and I to their home for a Passover Seder;  I put actual food on my plate and ate it hungrily. I remember Michael’s mother not-so-subtly sliding the platter of Kosher brownies my way.

The very next thing I did, to the surprise of my friends and family and the cataleptic stares of my various doctors, was buy a plane ticket to London.  I had a grad school friend who lived there and had firmly insisted that us Yankees could visit anytime. Now that it was over, my gastro specialist conjectured that the cause of my illness had been a bacteria that had gone undetected by their tests and  had worked its way out of my system (though I’d tried antibiotics); he warned me that there would be setbacks and side-effects to come  (and there were; I now  have a lovely case of permanent gastroparesis). I was undeterred; I was going to London, and then on to Paris, in mid-May.

When I arrived, my grad school friend met me at the tube stop, and then told me that, while he wanted to give me the tour of the city, I’d arrived during finals (he was attending, I believe, LAMDA at the time), so I’d have to guide myself around. This news was fine with me; I had very little energy, and knew I wouldn’t be up for any tours that didn’t involve a bench every fifty feet. He took me to his flat, and introduced me to his two roommates, who were members of a band called Apartment (they have a slightly easier to read Wikipedia entry, though the date of the band’s formation is wrong). They were kind and startlingly friendly, and when I thanked them for letting me crash on their couch for two and a half weeks (!), they were quick to say that they mostly slept at their girlfriends’ flats, and I was welcome to sleep in the bed of whomever was gone for the night, an offer I accepted gratefully. Their lived-in bedrooms were peaceful and cozy.

During the days, I’d wander (slowly) around the city, seeing Trafalgar Square, The National Gallery, Harrod’s, the Tate Modern, and stopping every couple of hours for another sandwich or Cadbury chocolate bar (my favorite was the Crunchie). At night, I’d come back to the flat, and hang out with the guys, who, joined by the two other members of the band who didn’t live there,  would inevitably be doing four things: playing a guitar, smoking  a cigarette, speaking French, or eating something. When someone put down the guitar , the cigarette smoker would stub out his butt and pick up the guitar. The former guitarist would go to the kitchen for a snack, the former French speaker would light a cigarette, and the former snacker, his mouth now free of food, would start speaking in French (which I mostly understand, luckily; the French was for the benefit of Tom, the bassist, who knew more French than English).  Their unintended show was hillarious to watch, and I looked forward to evenings when they were home.

They were attentive to me in a way that I would never have expected from strangers; we ordered pizzas several nights in a row, and they insisted I pick the toppings every time (capers all the way, baby). We drank cans of Strongbow and  they clowned around to make me laugh. When, a week in to my visit, I shyly told them that I loved music too,  loved especially to sing, the lead singer, a sweet  and strikingly handsome guy named David (holding the guitar in this pic of the band), played selections from the Jeff Buckley Grace album on the guitar so that I could sing them.  They played their demo CD for me, and I was seriously impressed; a couple of years later, I wasn’t surprised to learn that they’d scored a recording contract.

The obvious thought is that the attention they gave me was flirting, but they all had serious girlffriends, and to be frank, I was disgusting to look at.  I wasn’t, at that moment, a girl you flirted with; I was a girl you pitied. I was under a hundred pounds at 5’5, pale, stringy-haired, and weak; I looked like I’d been through a war on the losing side. But even though the few pictures I have of myself at that time clearly reveal how awful I looked, they never brought it up. I think they were fascinated to have a totally neutral girl  in their midst, a weird little transient oddity. When I was most in need of some non-threatening male attention, these guys were there for me, as if they somehow knew how badly off I was and cared about it even though we were total strangers.

Eventually, loneliness got the best of me on the trip, and I came home a few days early; I missed the true angel in my life, Liz, who had spent months driving me to the hospital, listening to me complain, cleaning the bathroom when I couldn’t face it, and cooking for me those few times when I felt like eating. I survived those months because of Liz, and I came out of that time feeling a bit more alive because of a few guys I’d never met before, who brought me a little joy and asked nothing in return. Angels of different shapes! I am still thankful.

On Earthly Purgatory

I mean this to be more cheery than it sounds. After all, even Dante himself claims (in the Purgatorio) that there’s a way out of Purgatory (and hey, it’s no big deal; all you have to do is correct each of your inherent personal flaws). Ostensibly, paradise awaits.

I’m too agnostic to believe in an afterlife or in a God with a rubric. I believe that all of our heavenly joys and hellish sorrows are here, live and unimagined. But what I haven’t yet figured out is the lesson of earthly purgatory, or any tricks to withstanding it.

I define my concept of purgatory as all of what we tolerate in the hopes that our lives will improve, or even in the service of improving them. All of the waiting.

For me, sometimes purgatory is a budgeted obstacle, ignorable, but lately, it’s been glaring. Maybe the change came from hearing that my ten-year-old sister-in-law has scoliosis and will wear a body brace twenty hours a day for years (this seems like purgatory distilled; she’ll literally wait in a tube, filled with potential and hope for what’s outside). Or maybe it was something trivial, like learning that my building manager will soon change all the light bulbs in every apartment to cold, headachy compact fluorescents (if there is more purgatorial lighting, I don’t know about it). Maybe it was the sum of my loved ones who wait at home for absent or deployed spouses, those who drag themselves to tedious or brutal jobs in hopes of promotion, those who expect medical test results any day now, and those who find themselves lonely and waiting quietly for love, all added to my own impotent cycle of thoughts that has run me like hamster for more than two years, preventing me from going forward.

Whatever the trigger was, the details of purgatory have recently become too sharp, too overwhelming. I’m usually the one who has no problem finding joy in small moments, but right now I’m too conscious of the gray shame of the therapist’s waiting room, the sparse, improvised living situation we can’t seem to escape. I grit my teeth before the daily walk to the commuter train, knowing that some not-so-clever person will have intentionally crushed all of the snails that tried to share the dew-coated sidewalk. David Ferry says it best in his poem “Old People”:

They’re in a room full of people almost without

Any furniture, only some metal chairs,

So the walls resound and Ceberus barks a lot.

It is a nightmare of the high school lunchroom.

I start to think that no amount of reaching out to people whose purgatory has become particularly oppressive would do any good. I can’t even buy my little sis-in-law a copy of Judy Blume’s Deenie (a YA novel from the seventies about a sixteen-year-old-girl with scoliosis) because it has masturbation scenes in it and I don’t feel it’s my place to expose her to something she might not be ready for. I’ve forgotten (temporarily, I hope) how to make the best of my own comparatively mild purgatory, and I’m slowly becoming convinced that no amount of scheming and machinating will pull me out of it, that I am waiting on something external, which is scary to a control freak like me.

I know hindsight is a factor here, but I’ve never looked back at a purgatorial time in my life with nostalgia, only with reverence for what I did to get through it. But, stuck or not, I don’t want to wish time away. The only thing I can think to do during this time is give and give to the people I care about, even when people get tired of my love, or even if it makes me seem servile or desperate; doing so reconnects me with the world, allows me intimacy that I struggle for otherwise, and makes me feel productive even when I can’t do anything notable to help myself.

Ladybugs gather on the windowscreen today; it makes me think of the ladybug infestation that my friend Nicole had in her dorm room senior year in college. They just kept coming out of the wall, first ten, then fifty, then hundreds. It was like, as I said in a little poem I wrote then, “a wish made too many times.” Quietly, Nicole and I both recognized that this was the first of many signs that it was time to move on from our college-selves (the other signs were funnier and drunker). I’m waiting for that sign now, the thing that tells me that I’m ready to go ahead, to, as Mark Doty says in his poem “Fish R Us,” “want to swim forward, want to eat, want to take place.”

Ok, For Now.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love my mom with the encompassing love that I imagine mothers have for their children.

My mother has always been cosmopolitan, yet homey;  mysterious, yet warm and familiar. I love what I know about her life, and what I don’t know. She was an underwear model, a pool shark, a schoolteacher. She got so many parking tickets in college that a few cops showed up to her graduation just to put a face to the name. (“I had a Beetle,” she explains, “it fit anywhere.”)

She had me eighteen months after her brother was murdered, and she cared for me ably despite her grief.  When she didn’t like the childrens’ books that were available, she made her own and cut out pictures from magazines to illustrate them.  She stayed home with me every day while my dad worked or traveled, let me wear crazy clothes, dye my hair, be willful.  On a health kick, she started making her own orange juice; as a high schooler, I woke up every morning to a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice being handed to me by the person I admired most. I think I could never possibly thank her enough for any of it.

She was never ostentatious about her mothering, never told anyone else they were doing it wrong or made me feel guilty about the piles and piles of herself that she gave to me.  I felt loved and wanted every day, but as early as age four, I had nightmares about losing her, and it’s always been my greatest dread. My friend Michael said it best: losing a parent is the one thing  for which we still experience a child’s boundary-less fear.

This last month, she’s had dizziness, a perceived (though not actual) loss of balance, and paresthesia in her legs and arms. None of the “easy” stuff explained it (Lyme disease, diabetes, a traumatic injury, etc.).  Neurological problems are common in her family; her  father died from complications from Myasthenia gravis in his sixties, and her mother died from a likely combination of Altzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in her seventies. My mother is about to turn 68.  Here we go, I thought.

I did research like every panicked family member does; I knew that the neurologist was thinking brain tumor. I was thinking brain tumor too, except I was willing it, if it was there, out of her sweet head. Into an MRI machine my poor claustrophobic mother went, as if she were, as novelist Scott Spencer says (in his painfully good novel A Ship Made of Paper), “tossing up [her] life, seeing where it would land.” On the phone after, she asked me questions about work, covering her fear. I answered her questions, suggested trips to Ikea and visits with my dog, when what I was really doing was freaking out.  I’m sure we both spent this time not sleeping and eating nothing but the Halloween candy we bought too early.

I won’t make you wait like I waited: the MRI was clean. She’ll do some nerve conduction tests, but a recent neck and spine xray (done a few days before the MRI) now suggests that the problem might be arthritis in her neck pressing on her nerves. What if we all cried ourselves to sleep for a month over arthritis?  I’d be very happy about that.

So she gets a reprieve, one that I’d have traded anything for her to have. But for how long? As Oskar Schell (in Jonathan Safran Foer’s knockout of a novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) says, “The towers are burning, and we’re all trapped.” Eventually the news won’t be good, the problem not minor. How will I help her then? What on earth will I do to show her that she doesn’t have to worry about me, that I want nothing more than to give her what she needs?

And, another question: why have I been so lucky? Now that we’re both adults, my mother and I have a keen radar; we show up at the same places all the time without planning it. I’ve begun to ask her questions about her life, things I’ve always wanted to know. These things are gifts that not everyone gets. I have several good friends who have lost their mothers, either in childhood when they needed them most, or at some critical moment in young adulthood. We’ve never talked about it, but I imagine that these friends would have done anything to have their mothers walk them down the aisle, or have them by their side when their marriages failed, or have them present and smiling encouragingly at the birth of a grandchild.  If I could give these things to my friends who have lost their mothers, I would. I would move the Earth to do it.

For now, I get to continue; it is a luck I don’t feel I necessarily deserve.  Someday soon I’ll know the depth of this burden, will know the truth of a poem from Barbara Helfgott Hyett‘s book Natural Law in which she laments the loss of her parents; in it, she describes herself  ”dancing in the living room to no one’s praise.”  But for now, I’ll do right, I’ll make the most of it.

“You gotta to go to Ypsilanti to find out the future,”

according to Chloe, a character from Charles Baxter’s novel The  Feast of Love. This novel was published in 2000, and it was a National Book Award finalist, which didn’t mean that I’d ever heard of it or seen it (because I hadn’t).  I picked up my copy at a used bookstore in Columbia, Missouri, where I was visiting my friend Nicole to help her pick out paint colors for her new house and cruise for amish furniture (I can’t believe I thought they’d have a website).

It was by far the best book I read all summer. Moments from it occur to me when I find myself in the same situations as the characters, which happens more often than I ever would have thought (and which also means that it’s a damned good book). On Thursday, I was on the commuter rail into the city for my longest workday of the week, and I was feeling tired and reluctant. I thought about the book, and about how one of the protagonists (a fortyish coffee shop owner) asks his father if he ever feels completely unmotivated for his job, and the father says something that I’ve been mumbling to myself over and over:

“Son, Monday morning is Monday morning. Everybody’s got to do it. There are no solutions, there’s only the work.”

I’d been mulling over that last part especially, the idea that “solutions” and “work” are opposites, which led me into  existential, IWW-esque pondering about the nature of work that I won’t subject anyone to (what is my “work,” exactly?).

Instead, I’ll tell you what happened next. At the end of my long day, while waiting for the train to go home, I stood near a group of tables in the train station. I usually wait outside near the tracks, but the temperature had dropped in that tricky early fall way.  A woman sitting at one of the tables had a book open in her lap, and, being nosy, I looked down at the book from where I was standing to try to figure out what book it was, and if I’d read it.

You know where this is going. It was, naturally, The Feast of Love. I’ll bet you even know what page the book was open to (I’ll give you a hint: “There are no solutions, there’s only the work.”)

It was all I could do to not yelp, “Oh, that’s a GREAT book. You’ll LOVE that book.” It’s in my nature to freak people out (I admit), but I try to collar this tendency when strangers are involved. But it was so tempting, the way it’s tempting to tell anyone who is about to do something that you did and loved how wonderful the experience they’re about to have will be.  To kids going away to college, I want to say Glorious!  Do everything, say yes, don’t miss one hour. To people falling in love for the first time, I want to say These startling moments make the rules from now on.

At these moments, I’m nostalgically jealous. I get this same feeling on a smaller scale with books that I’ve loved and that my friends are just reading for the first time.  I love giving my friends copies of books that I’ve read a million times, books that I know are capable of changing one’s shape, and I love when my friends trust me with the books that have changed them.

Though I don’t believe in coincidences, I let that strange moment of connection in the train station go unsquealed-over.  I’m hoping in exchange for my restraint, I’ll be rewarded sometime soon with the  moment’s meaning. Was it a warning? A suggestion?  Let’s have it, fate. Or do I need to go to Ypsilanti to find out?

My Last Words on Living in the City

(In the style of old radio broadcasts, some of these posts will be true stories rather than updates.)

When my neighbor had his psychotic break (calling his mother and blathering in some invented language, then threatening suicide and disappearing), the cops used my tiny studio apartment as their home base. Unable to locate the roommate or the landlord, they were trying to decide if they should break down the door. They sat awkwardly on my bed and couch, getting up periodically to check the hallway one more time.

I couldn’t help them; I didn’t have keys, and at that point, I didn’t even know his name. My only encounters with the twenty-something guy (who I’ll call Kal, because he looked like Kal Penn from Harold and Kumar) were in the middle of the night, when he’d drunkenly pound on my door, sometimes hissing “I know you’re in there.” I’d get up, push my bureau in front of the door, and go back to sleep. I expected him to someday threaten to huff, puff, and blow my house in. I was twenty-two, finishing up a limbo year before starting grad school. I worked at a grocery store that required a Hawaiian shirt as its uniform, and I had just broken up with a guy who’d turned out to be gay. It took me two horror-movie days after move-in to catch the giant Peruvian centipede that had arrived in an imported couch. It wasn’t the time of my life.

I also wasn’t much help because I was drunk; the cops had knocked authoritatively on my door at about ten pm, in the midst of some pre-gaming my friend Evan (who was visiting from New York) and I were doing with a Tupperware of White Russian and some unforgivable dance music. When the po-lice had knocked, my first instinct was to say Shit! Hide the keg! This time, we were legally drunk in both senses, though neither the idea of a suicidal neighbor nor the seven cops perched on my yard sale furniture created a party atmosphere, even with Nelly still playing in the background. This was the summer of 2001, before 9/11 changed everything. Now I look back on those cops lolling around helplessly in my apartment and am amazed; surely today they’d have broken the door down, and maybe had guns pointed.

When the roommate came home (we’ll call the roommate Andy, since he looked like a handsome college friend with the same name), he handed over his keys to one of the officers. The cops left behind indents in my bedspread when they got up en masse to see what would happen. When the door was opened, an odor of urine wafted from inside, and on a second inhale, there was also the smell of vitamins, a medicinal smell. Kal wasn’t in the apartment, dead or alive, but he’d pissed on the floors in every room. He’d upended furniture and shattered hanging artwork. He’d pulled all of the houseplants from their pots and gathered them into a decorative bowl with a candle burning at the center. Leaning against the wall in front of the bowl was a framed line drawing of Al Pacino in Scarface. Kal had crushed a bottle of Vitamin E gelcaps onto the kitchen counters, and the ooze had spread into the stove. The whole apartment had a sort of static around it, like a crime scene before you know what the crime is.

Satisfied that Kal wasn’t there, the cops dispersed (Kal would be arrested later that night on an Amtrak train in New Jersey after breaking one of the train’s windows in a rage). Andy went to his girlfriend’s place for the night, and Evan and I, we went out; the city moves, and we moved with it. The next day, after taking Evan to the bus station, I came home to activity in the apartment next to mine; Andy and his girlfriend Rachel were cleaning up the mess Kal had left. They had Bob Marley going on the stereo, and were wearing latex gloves. I introduced myself, offered to help, and then had five or so of the only meaningful hours I’ve ever spent with strangers.

I brought my cordless phone with me because I was still taking calls from my ex, but when the phone rang that night, I didn’t answer; I was wrist-deep in vitamin E, trying to muck it out of the stove-wells. We sang along with the music, and Andy, shaken by his friend’s mental collapse, found ways to make sympathetic jokes (“He knows something I don’t about Pacino,” he said, getting ready to dump the homage Kal had created).

When the place was clean, Andy made kichari; he said all of our livers would feel better once we ate it, and though I have no idea what my liver feels like, I felt good, warmed, less isolated in my chosen city than I’d felt in the whole year I’d been there. We had seconds and thirds while Andy and Rachel talked about Kal, filled in the vaguely menacing sketch I had of him with more human details. I went home with a recipe and a mildly less cynical worldview.

The spell broke, as all spells must, when Kal arrived home a week later. I’d been back a few times to see my new friends, but to Kal, whose head was shaven, and whose desk was now covered in amber pill bottles, I was still the weird girl-recluse next door. They both moved out on schedule at the start of September, and I started grad school. I never heard from any of them again; I don’t even remember their real names. But before that week, I knew the city as a solid, solemn place, where threat was commonplace, and where the soft insides of others’ existences were unknowable. I learned that even in a harsh place, you have to make yourself a little bit weak to know anyone, and there I was, made vulnerable finally by someone else’s nervous breakdown and a handful of mung beans.

Not a Mommy Blog

“‘Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world.”

- from  Orlando by Virginia Woolf