What is this thing called Love?

Close

Kate, Amanda and CS

Kate, Amanda and CS

WWhen I met Amanda in New York, years ago, she told me her name was Leslie –but many lasting friendships begin with one good lie. I cannot now imagine life without her, my crazy blonde jewess of the midnight movie run, rain-soaked and giggling, with popcorn butter on her chin. Oh, wait –that’s me. Amanda is the friend who dances well, dresses fashionably, and gets more than her share of the Male Gaze when we‘re out on the town (it’s true!) –but more importantly, she’s the friend who listens to my man-troubles, job-troubles, and troubles with, well, everything. Then she smiles and says, “let’s get bubble tea!”

Here’s how the story ends:

“So it came to pass, in a sleepy Colorado suburb, that The Lady, the Priest and the Assassin went looking for trouble fun. The Priest and the Assassin, though opposed to each others’ methods, turned out to be ideological bedfellows, so to speak, and they shared many expensive hygiene products too. They’d been traveling the Wild West together for nearly a month, seeing many sights, tasting many foods. Whenever the Assassin got an urge to kill someone, the Priest would say to her, “Hey now, you can’t really go through life killing folks! Think of the lowly squirrel, and you will see the error of your ways.” This stopped the Assassin cold; you can’t win squirrel arguments. Likewise, when the Priest got an urge to kill herself, the Assassin would say to her, “Hey now, if you kill yourself, who will talk me out of killing others?” and this was enough to prevent the Priest from committing suicide. Days passed in this lovely way, until one afternoon a fateful thing happened: The Lady rolled into town.

Now, The Lady’s coming was both foreseen and welcome, but it spelled one thing for our heroes: fun trouble. They saw many things together in cowpoke Colorado, drove around, ate food. There was a baby sleeping on a couch. They lusted after Javier Bardem on the big screen, each in her own fashion. This was before the time of chocolate overload, when all things (even the lisping actor) were forgotten, followed by a visit to the world of Men and Floozies (see: Michael Garman’s Magic Town). And then, as it does, the inevitable happened.

The Priest fell in love with the Lady, but was very conflicted by it, as The Lady was most surely a sinner. The Assassin, on the other hand, had developed a yen for the Priest, and so you have it: the classic Love Triangle. There was a great to-do, a certain incident involving pancake batter, and all relations between the three heroes soured to the flavor of moldy pickles in a jar. In the end, the Assassin discovered the lovers conducting one of their private “prayer sessions”, drew her sword, and in a single motion murdered The Lady, sepukku-style. The Priest’s eyes flew toward heaven and she said, “Thank God she was Jewish. They don’t go to Hell.”

{ 3 comments }

Close

Petersburg, Alaska

Petersburg, Alaska

AAlaska, that wild state of affairs up north, has occupied a place in my mind like the corner that gathers cobwebs in an attic. To its inside passage my love fled ten years ago, and to its mossy, creosote-soaked pillars I have been tied since. In a manner of speaking. He worked at the fishery, slept in the woods like an animal, and sent me postcards to let me know he was alive. He read Notes from the Underground as I waited, but he stayed too long in this place where my voice, my hands, couldn’t reach him.

This story occurred so long ago that its telling is positively maudlin; we were children then, we’re good friends now. However, when I picture Alaska it always takes on this tint, this bruised color beneath the snow. I am sure that my visit to Petersburg was a bit bluer, a bit truer for the memory. In the strange way people can be, I felt better having seen the patch of trees where he slept, the coffee shop where he sat. I felt as though these places were telling me a story. The story of–I don’t know–the story of a young man running away from love? A youth gone wet-faced into the wild? or just a story of boredom?

“Lots of people moved here to escape the law,” Kira explained to us, kicking a rock with her foot. Our ferry arrived early and quietly, slipping into town and without much fanfare slipping away. Tom and Kira know everyone in Petersburg: waving at passers-by, it seems like they all have a story to tell. This guy lives in a filthy trailer and builds wood furniture so beautiful it’d make you weep, that one drinks his own urine–for the health benefits, he swears! Most everyone here is here only seasonally; they subsist on the fish.

I asked Tom, who has worked at the Petersburg fishery for over a decade, if the Alaskan salmon are being depleted beyond conscionable levels. Of course, the next question is, “whose conscience?” That of the owners of the canneries? Or of the fishermen whose lives depend on each season’s yield? The consumers’? As it turns out, it does seem that the yearly cull of Alaskan salmon is highly regulated and that the fish have a swimming chance. This was not always so. Overfishing in the region prompted President Ike to declare Alaska a “federal disaster area” in 1953, meaning that his government (which was responsible for funding the management and research necessary to prevent a, umm, disaster) had failed. Upon statehood in ‘59, this responsibility transferred to Alaska, and the situation improved, then dipped, then improved again, till the Happy Now: thirty-three state hatcheries releasing 1.2 to 1.4 billion juvenile salmon per decade, and a limited entry permit system controlling the volume of fishing allowed.

Bully for you, Alaska! Oh, state of Midnight Sun, of the Northern Lights. The word “Alaska” comes from the Russian “Alyaska”, which came from the Aleut “alaxsxaq”, meaning literally, “the object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”. As game hunters have argued, an animal’s usefulness to us is what guarantees its survival (sigh…this is the sort of animal we are), a theory so neatly exemplified by the wild salmon who–for goodness’ sake!–have steps built for them in particularly steep upstream areas. If we can save these shimmery and dumb creatures from extinction, where are the government-funded elephant orphanages? The laws that curtail the use of heat-seeking weaponry, fired from aircraft, against fleeing wolves?

Now that Kate and I are back in the “lower 48″, staying with Amanda’s parents in Centennial, CO, I remember Alaska the way I saw it: spare, chilly and through a haze of drunkenness. We had arrived on the last day of fishing season; everyone taking to the streets in a great bellow of exhaustion–the kind of exhaustion you feel when, at 2 am in a bar in a strange town, the prospect of walking home seems more tiring than that of having another drink. It is a happy, smiling exhaustion. When finally we did make it back to Kira and Tom’s place, we’d tipped over into that magic zone where nothing at all was tiring, and stayed up late making pizza, taking pictures and laughing so much my throat hurt for days. Petersburg is a picturesque, quirky and altogether disquieting place. I woke early the next day to shoot pictures of the misty mountains and found myself chatting with one scruffy local after another. Nowhere is loneliness more profound than in a fishing town at six in the morning. It’s touching, really…all these renunciates, misfits and young summer workers mashed together…at once running from and striving toward women.

And what else is there?

I’ll never know why my friend went to Petersburg, Alaska. But now I have seen the town, I have felt its allure. Like a woman, like the “object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”, this wild place which called to (and claimed) Chris McCandless at twenty-three, Alaska has left me with a new sort of hunger. More of an itch, actually. It’s really no big deal. I’m sure there’s a topical cream for it.

{ 0 comments }

Close

lamentations

lament

WWe could never make it to the Fall. The Halloween Express will not give any gifts this year, again. But, She would be a gift to any man. You love the autumn, the red leaves and long white limbs. Scarred and Ugly limbs made you a forest of boredom. You have never known a forest of beech, of oak, of chestnut. Those are forests. Do I ever go to another man? With this face? This is a face that is known. How would you like to be ugly, Beautiful One? I was born ugly. All of my life I have been ugly. You, beautiful, who know nothing about women, do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? Life is very strange. I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet, men have loved me and I have loved them. You and other men look at my ugliness yet there is that feeling that blinds him when he loves you. I, with that feeling, blind him, blind myself. Then one day, for no reason, he starts to see you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand this, Beautiful? After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful grows, slowly in once again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, Beautiful One, that you are not ugly. You and your women are lucky.

{ 2 comments }

Close

Little Ben, waiting to exhale...

little Ben, waiting to exhale….

TThe Chevy’s latest quirk is to decelerate on inclines to a disturbing 30mph; as we wound slowly up the road Kate murmured under her breath “This is not Seattle”. I’d been telling her for weeks that we would stay in Seattle, the City of Flowers, because in a silly way I thought my friend Jamie lives there. She doesn’t. She lives in the Cascade Mountains, on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. We passed a building with a jubilant sign declaring “Teriyaki Milk Barn!” and took a left.

I called Jamie five times, crossing little bridges, passing farms pastoral and weird, twisting our way up the mountainside. I looked forward to seeing the home she’s made with her husband, Bryan, a video game developer from Everett. What’s little Jamie been up to all these years?

I can’t really say how we met; she was a grade beneath me in high school, but her smarty-pants program and mine often threw us together. Was it a party? Doubtful–I rarely got invited. Soccer? Model U.N.? Shucks, I forget. She helped me with math homework, I made ouija boards for her friends. In the summer of my junior year, I left home and stayed with her family till graduation. I was given a room of my own and loved it. Jamie seemed to me then a kind of “golden child”: pretty, blonde, smart, friends with the freaks and the geeks (this was before they got their own show), possessing of gentle parents who allowed her a cool boyfriend, and –to top it all off– her mother raised rabbits in the backyard.

The last time I saw her, Jamie was living on Monroe Avenue in Rochester, tending her store that sold chain mail jewelry and black-black dresses, and…I seem to recall a certain little pair of…shiny Boots of Leather? Downy sins of streetlight fancies? You can only wear those things in TOWN, Mavis, not in the country.

We turned up a driveway, rounded the bend and rolled to a stop. A screen door slammed shut and out came Jamie, wearing a black hoodie and slim-fit jeans. From her purple house scrambled a pack of dogs, many dogs! and I knew that Jamie was the same sweet kid of my heart’s memory.
These are the sort of people you want your children around: they’re vegetarians, succumb to ice cream once in a while, compost their own food scraps, and rehabilitate abused animals. He paints, she welds, he cooks, she sews. Sore from our own domestic attempts, Kate and I took heart in the love these two so clearly shared.

Maybe there is hope for us yet. Who knows? Maybe there is lots of hope.

{ 1 comment }