I don’t know why I’m doing this. While skimming Vulture.com, I noticed an article mentioning this movie. Apparently they did some kind of review of this movie, but I didn’t read it. I thought I’d do one myself!
0.00 Setting of movie: well-to-do though non-descript suburb of California.
0.25 Literally the first thing the audience is confronted with in this film is an up-close of the main character’s underwear and his (slightly) bulging crotch. The first lines are a voice-over of him saying “I am so fucked.” My expectations for this movie are the same.
1.20 One minute and twenty seconds in and the movie has already revealed a classic movie cliche: the drunk mother.
1.54 Main character discovers his mother unconscious on her couch, surrounded by a bottle of pills and bottles of alcohol. Christ, this is not very wholesome. Isn’t Selena Gomez like some Disney foot-soldier?
3.00 After mother is taken away in ambulance (not dead, yay!), main character (the son) discovers written in his mother’s suicide note that she is aware that her son has been sleeping with his best friend’s mom, who is also a friend of the mother. Can’t tell if this is the reason she attempted suicide. But the movie doesn’t dwell on it either, and she’s carted off without much fanfare. Did I mention that the son is completely non-plussed during this entire thing?
4.00 Main character keeps breaking the fourth wall to explain plot points. My hopes for this film continue to diminish.
4.23 The audience is taken back to two weeks prior before this incident. We’re treated to another rather disappointing crotch-shot.
5.00 We discover that the mom’s name is Lucy.
5.27 During breakfast at the family’s home, we’re now introduced to the family, who all solidly flaunt their cliches. The mother is a forgetful alcoholic, the daughter is a sarcastic and slutty partygoer, the older brother (Steven) is a dimwitted ape, and the main character is the whiny misunderstood son.
6.52 The son (still don’t know his name) finally encounters the dad sneaking around outside the house. We are told that, apparently, the only reason the dad has not divorced the mom is because he can’t afford it. So instead he sneaks around and has affairs with secretaries. In very snarky, fast movie banter, the two discuss how the son has discovered one of his dad’s sex tapes with one of these women. Again, none of this makes either character uncomfortable.
6.55 Three thing: 1) The main character does not call his father “dad,” but instead by his first name, “Joseph.” 2) Maybe this is an indication of how distant or casual their relationship is, because he then politely asks his father please not to leave any semen on the camera tripod again when he’s done with it. 3) Every scene in this movie thus far has been packed to the brim with filthy, filthy content, as well as that typical movie dialogue in which everyone has a snarky line loaded in the chamber, and these quips are traded with lightning speed.
7.15 Wow, we now have our first full frontal nudity shot. Did not see that one coming. It’s of a girl working a pole in a strip joint. It’s also where the sister (Kristen) works. As a stripper.
7.25 More boobs.
7.30 I’ve lost track of the plot at this point. The main character has been tasked with running an errand for some coke-snorting macho dude at the strip club. He sends the main character to the apartment of a trashy looking woman (named –wait for it- “Cherish”), who promptly offers to blow the main character if he tells her how to get her stomach pumped. To recap: literally every single every woman in this film so far is either 1) an alcoholic; 2) a stripper; 3) an alcoholic stripper; or 4) in the ICU for being an alcoholic.
8.00 Main character does not tell Cherish how to get her stomach pumped, but she proceeds to blow him anyway. To arouse him, she takes off her shirt, revealing her silicone chest. Even more incredibly, the movie shamelessly replays the moment she takes off her shirt over and over, for no apparent reason other than to arouse the audience.
8.07 I remain flaccid.
8.39 I finally discover the main character’s name: Ricky. He runs to his best friend Billy’s house, and his greeted at the door by Mrs. Bender, Billy’s mother. She is wearing a glaringly low-cut black dress and holding (can you guess?!) a glass of wine.
9.00 After an awkward exchange, Ricky asks if Billy is home, and Mrs. Bender indicates that he is probably up in his room masturbating. I am now classifying this movie as science fiction, because none of these characters act or talk like real people. I am also becoming suspicious that this movie was a massive prank by Selena Gomez to punk the several dozen people who watched this film into wasting 90 minutes of their life.
9.02 I realize that the Selena Gomez character has yet to make a genuine appearance, besides as a shimmering, sexual figure of Ricky’s fantasies.
9.14 Ricky bursts into Billy’s room to discover Billy Bender, pants around his ankles, beating off to a Human Sexuality textbook. Nothing in this film surprises me anymore.
9.15 This reminds me of how my college sophomore year roommate -a fantastically conservative Christian kid from South Korea- had to take a Human Sexuality course. If I remember correctly, I recall being surprised when he told me how much he was enjoying the class, saying it was “very interesting.” His grades were always pretty bad, and eventually he left SU and returned to Korea to complete his military service there. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to him. Is he gearing up to defend the homeland from Kim Jong-un? Does he still have a personal relationship with Jesus? Does he cry tears of shame when he yanks it?
9.30 We now know what Billy’s o-face looks like, and we have to endure a painfully long scene of him cleaning up. All in all, Ricky takes the whole scene quite well.
10.50 Billy’s mom sends Billy off to the store to buy more cigarettes, but forces Ricky to stay, clearly hoping to seduce him.
11.30 Mrs. Bender proceeds to seduce Ricky on the couch. She offers to help Ricky get better with his sexual abilities by offering to be his “teacher” in this area. This all goes off without a hitch.
13.00 Mrs. Bender and Ricky have sex. (Unseen by the viewer.)
13.01 What are California’s laws, because I’m pretty sure this would be statutory rape in New York state.
14.00 Ricky, realizing the next day what he has done, imagines how every other character in the movie would react upon discovering his transgression. When we get to Selena Gomez, she says “You’re a mother fucker, Ricky Stevens, I will never be your girlfriend.”
14.20 I now find Selena Gomez even more wildly unattractive than I did before watching this film.
15.30 At school, Ricky announces to Billy that he’s going to ask out Nina (Selena Gomez). This is overheard by another boy, who reminds me of a more sinister version of Brainy from Hey Arnold! This boy, named Karlis, looks like a newsboy from the 1900s, and acts like the kind of person who builds pipebombs and enjoys smelling used panties. He challenges Ricky, on the wager of $1000, that he cannot nail Selena Gomez in two weeks. For reasons beyond anyone, Ricky accepts. I guess this is supposed to pass as the major subplot of the film.
15.41 We learn that Karlis is the son of a mobster. Will they do a spin-off movie featuring Karlis? I would watch that.
17.50 Ricky walks through the hallway of his school and witnesses Selena Gomez as she (for reasons not made clear) promptly breaks up with her slack-jawed boyfriend, Kevin, who shouts “Bitch!” as she stomps off.
18.00 The primary characters (Ricky, Karlis, Billy, Gomez) are sitting in Latin class. Their geriatric teacher tries to get Ricky to conjugate a verb before -and I can still hardly believe it- suddenly having from a heart attack, collapsing, and dying right there in the front of the classroom. From all my deductive reasoning, I have yet for the life of me to understand the purpose of this scene in the film.
19.00 Never mind, the point of his death was to allow classes to be cancelled for the rest of the day, which opens up an opportunity for Ricky to approach Gomez for some flirting. I am glad that old man died with purpose.
20.00 Ricky asks Gomez if she would like to attend the funeral with him. I suppose this is now considered an appropriate place to take a date.
20.05 I have decided that I will now being asking girls to be my +1 to all wakes and/or burials in the future.
21.00 Selena Gomez has a very round face, with puffy cheeks, big wet eyes, and tan skin. Perhaps she is really an Ewok.
25.00 A new sublot emerges in which Ricky, hoping to impress Gomez the Ewok, tells her that he likes Josh Groban. Amazingly, there is a Josh Groban concert the following day, forcing Ricky to scramble about trying to get tickets. Or something. At this point my eyes have mostly glazed over and my testicles have fully retreated back into my body.
20.00 Oh, one more thing: Selena Gomez’s character is a highly prude Christian girl who aspires to be a priest (I’m not making this up.) Obviously, this throws a wrench in Ricky’s plan to take her to pound-town.
20.35 Selena Gomez is not a very good actor.
32.00 Here’s a challenge. See if you can decide which of these are real plot points in this movie:
A) Ricky and Billy discover that their fathers both enjoy engaging in leather-clad BDSM together in a seedy motel room with their neighbors. Ricky and Billy decide to surprise them and photograph them in their BDSM costumes.
B) The actor who played David Puddy in Seinfeld is the principal of the school, and selects a feeble old Catholic nun to replace the dead Latin teacher. This nun also has narcolepsy and falls asleep at her desk. She briefly wakes up before losing consciousness again. However, this time, it’s because she has died.
C) Principal Puddy has an extensive collection of photos from the girl’s bathroom. Ricky and Billy discover these pictures and blackmail him in order to get out of trouble.
D) Ricky somehow manages to get a crooked car dealer to loan him an Aston Martin. Later, while driving it, Ricky is pulled over, and told by the police officer that the car formerly belonged to an infamous Lithuanian mobster. Then, at the police station, Ricky is questioned by the chief of police, played by Gary Busey, who reveals to Ricky that the aforementioned mobster was discovered tied up and dead in the trunk of the convertible.
E) As Ricky and Billy attempt to turn their house into a makeshift strip-joint/brothel full of strippers in order to make some fast cash, Mrs. Bender promptly crashes the party and attempts to force herself on Ricky. She then proceeds to masturbate with an electric whisk. Then Billy walks in and sees his mother doing this. Then she attempts to seduce Billy -her own son- by licking his face.
F) Ricky’s sister is accepted to Stanford University.**
49.47 I learn that Ricky is 17 years old. The age of consent in New York State is 17. So I think we’re good on the earlier statutory rape point. Thank goodness, for a second there I almost thought this movie’s plot was incoherent and disgusting.
50.01 I realize I have made a mistake. This movie was definitely not filmed in New York. After doing some fact-checking, I learn it was indeed filmed in California. California’s penal code defines statutory rape as someone who is not a minor having sex with someone who is a minor (in CA, defined as younger than 18). Therefore, the plot of this film rests on repeated instances of statutory rape (it is implied that Ricky and Mrs. Bender have sex repeatedly in the film). Which, you know, is kinda icky.
50.02 Upon further snooping, I learn that this film took 20 days to complete filming. I then surmise that it took the writers about 20 minutes to establish a working script.
51.34 The only redeeming scene of the movie thus far: M83’s “Midnight City” plays while Ricky drives his Aston Martin. This scene is then ruined by Ricky’s babbling blonde lawyer (not important) who is riding alongside him in the car, and has swallowed a handful of ecstasy pills, thinking them aspirin.
60.44 Selena Gomez is a horrible actor.
60.57 This movie would have been considerably better if they had replaced Selena Gomez with an actual Ewok.
64.18 I’m going to walk away from the movie as it plays for several minutes and see if it affects how I feel about the film.
67.12 I’ve returned to witness a scene in which the party/brothel has been broken up and, amid the chaos, a greasy looking Italian man has been struck and killed by a live electrical wire from a telephone pole.
67.35 A profound depression overtakes me, though I try to remain optimistic as I am now two-thirds done with my masochistic experiment.
70.09 For some reason, everyone but Ricky is in jail. Selena is in jail, too. I wish she’d stay there.
73.21 This is by far the worst movie I have ever seen. I feel that I am now mentally prepared, should I have to, to watch Scarlett Johansson in Lucy.
76.22 Most of the men (and some of the women) in this movie are getting crabs.
77.22 I’ve lost track of the number of prison rape jokes.
79.43 Ricky goes to the hospital to see his mother. Upon getting to her room, a Jamaican nurse tells him that he is too late, and that she has already died. The actor playing Ricky does a horrible attempt at what appears to be crying. Either that, or the writers purposefully wrote for him to act only mildly discomforted by the death of his mother. I think we all know which is more likely.
81.10 We discover that Ricky had went to the wrong hospital bed, and that his mother is in fact still alive. *sigh*
83.45 Ricky meets with his bosomy blonde lawyer (don’t worry, it’s an irrelevant plot point), who received her degree from Stanford. She then not-subtly implies that butt-sex and chlamydia are rampant at Stanford. Can anyone confirm this?
87.22 We come to what I hope is the conclusion of the film. Ricky leaves the hospital, his family salvaged and now accepting of each others’ differences. Out on the street, Ricky walks in front of a truck carrying caged chickens, causing the cages to spill into the street. Selena Gomez then comes out of nowhere. Amid the raining feathers, he then pronounces his love to the Ewok, and they kiss triumphantly. Fin.
90.00 Cut to credits. We learn that this film was based upon the book “While I’m Dead…Feed the Dog”. While I’ve never been a supporter of book burning, I am reconsidering it.
Bonus: After more snooping, I’ve learned that the author of the original novel as disavowed this film for having gone against the source material of the book. It makes you wonder why the screenwriters of this film didn’t just stick to the original plot of the book. In fact, the producers of this film could have just spliced the Ewok scenes from Return of the Jedi with any B-level porno movie and have made something better than this steaming piece of tripe.
*Apparently, Justin Bieber makes a brief cameo in this movie as a prisoner, during the jail scene. However, his scene must have occurred while I had briefly walked away from my computer. Disappointed at not having seen this, I compensated for this by looking at a picture of Justin Bieber’s actual mug shot.
**Trick question: these are all actual plot points in the movie.
“This is when people start hooking up,” A.M chimes in as she looks about.
A.M. and I stand at the corner and survey the sloping roads that cut through campus. Along every block a boy and girl walk briskly as tight pairs back toward the now-quieting neighborhoods, or to the dormitories. Some affectionately link arms, but most stiffly jam their hands into coat pockets. They turn their faces down against the wind, which sweeps up with a great, roaring announcement at odd intervals, biting the face and pushing against the body from awkward, pointed angles. A.M. and I commence our journey to the east-side neighborhood, which lies just beyond the edge of campus. There, she rents a house. My car is parked nearby, waiting, stony and silently, for me to drive it back to my home in the outer suburbs of Syracuse.
I check my phone. Half-past one in the morning. I can already feel the cold air steal the blood from my ears. We begin the steep climb up Marshall Street, which inclines sharply when passing the Park Point apartment building, heading up toward Ostrom Avenue. Suddenly, though, I remember that this route will force us to walk by Thornden Park, which is common knowledge to be a bad idea at night. Crime does tend to dip in the wintry months, and the reflection of the neon street lights against the glitz of the snowy terrain makes for high visibility, but we astutely turn heel and decide on taking Comstock, safely within the perimeters of campus.
Navigating the unshoveled sidewalks is a test of grace. We are forced into a balancing act upon the thick, lumpy grey snow, our only solace being a thin, well-worn trench in the middle of the walk from that night’s heavy foot-traffic. Peering through the wind and flakes I see in the distance a group of students bumbling toward us. The men, as is their nature, try their best to negotiate the uneven footing with as much suave as possible while in the presence of girls, who, I think, are more willing to reach out a hand and grab a close shoulder in the momentary peril of a slipping foot.
We pass them, but are soon presented with another two girls along the walk. It doesn’t take the veteran eye of a college grad to spot a drunk, what with the violent tilting and overcorrecting of the body’s posture, like a Weeble toy from the 70s. One of the girls becomes tangled in her feet before spilling into the tightly packed snow bank that shoulders one side of the walkway. Her arms flail as the rest of her body seems cemented into the impression she has made in the bank. Playing the Good Samaritan, I extend a hand, steady my own weight, and yank Drunk Girl out. Drunk Girl is stout, with brown skin, dark curly hair, and glasses. Her friend, who has stopped to notice the inebriated catastrophe that is her companion, comes up to us and offers thanks. This girl has blonde hair, fair skin, and plump, rosy cheeks. She is either sober or far better at holding her liquor, but at any rate, babysitting will be on her list of duties this evening.
No sooner did I prop Drunk Girl up on her feet did she flop with a dull thud right back down on the sidewalk. At this point, the three of us are in a team effort to coax this girl back to reality. Or at least to her feet again. Her glasses, which are now dangling off her chin, are glazed with frost and snow from the fall. I try to correct them on her face as A.M. and the friend grab her arms to heave her up. It’s hopeless, and she resigns herself as dead weight on the cold, wet cement. She begins to wail. Not loudly, but certainly enough to have her confused with a toddler. Her friend –bless her heart– clearly recognizes that Drunk Girl is a lost cause, and with a tone of surrender in her voice that is at once both pitiful and noble, she implores A.M. and I to continue on. And we do, but not before I ask the girl if she would like me to call DPS to come and give her a ride home. She kindly rejects, and no sooner did I say these words did I puzzle over them. Offering to call campus security? Does that make me a mature, considerate fellow human being, or a old, out-of-touch former student? Obviously she doesn’t want DPS to come; these two are are clearly underage little freshies or sophomores. Ack. Who am I.
We trek on through the cold, down along the impending row of frat houses, most of which are now dark, but from a few we faintly hear the muted pulse of rhythmic bass as it travels out from the seedy basements and dank living-rooms devastated from the revelry of dancing and alcohol. Behind us, becoming ever-smaller as we maintain our slog through the snow, we see Drunk Girl (whose real name, A.M. kindly reminded me later, is Adrianna) plopped down in the bank, hunched and pouting like a child in time-out, while her friend adopts the tone that humanity has deemed judicious when dealing with both hopeless drunk people and insufferable little children. You know, that loud, slow yet commanding voice that offers lines like, “ADRIANNA, I NEED YOU TO LISTEN TO WHAT I’M SAYING TO YOU, OKAY? DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING TO YOU? I NEED YOU TO TAKE MY HAND. I NEED YOU…OKAY I NEED TO LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT ME, ADRIANNA. GET UP, ADRIANNA, OKAY? ON YOUR FEET. STOP CRYING, ADRIANNA. LET’S. GO. ADRIANNA.”
You know, that voice.
//
Natives of Syracuse who have had the privilege of traveling to Italy might recognize the origins of its name. (To which I might pose to them: you came back? You didn’t stay!?) Siracusa is a coastal region of Sicily, and let me give credit where it’s due: from the pictures, the place doesn’t look half bad. Now, I don’t mean to knock the Syracuse of Central New York, but I just saw the sun for the first time in weeks today, and while it puts a little skip in my step, it really only means that I have a vaguely short amount of time to shift the cardboard boxes of storage around in my basement before several months worth of compacting snow finally melts into the ground and turns my basement into a very different kind of below-ground pool. And then my car got a flat today, so the world clearly isn’t looking to do me any favors right now.
I am a native of Central New York. I grew up in Manlius, a small, charming, and stifling commuter suburb about 20 minutes by car from the city’s edges and from its lifeline, the university. But a safe, quaint suburb is nothing like Syracuse, and I want to very explicitly strike down any notion that growing up here has given me any insight about the city, its plight, or its people. Well, except maybe to call out what I think was an outrageously gross misstep in making orange the color with which to brand our school and sports teams. Orange should never dominate an outfit, let alone a region’s entire identity. (It may, however, accent an outfit in the fall season, provided the other colors are primarily neutrals. For example, an amber orange scarf with an oak-brown top and dark black pants. Huff. Anyway. Where was I.)
All I can claim is an ability to bitch about the weather with more immunity. Kids arrive here to study from sunny Southern states or milder coastal towns and then with a great promptness begin their unsolicited bemoaning at the first frost. It would be cute if it wasn’t so relentless. After four winters here, they’ll get used to it, sure. But they merely adopt the cold. I was born in it, molded by it. The light retreats from us by late October and we don’t see it until March. We CNYers don’t need a god-damn groundhog to tell us that we’re usually in it for the long haul each year.
And finally, allow me to make this second fact crystal clear: like many college towns across this country, it is impossible to detach the city from the educational institution within it. (Or in our case, quite literally on top of and looking down on it.) As many here know, Syracuse University sits atop what is called “the Hill” area of the city. But this is not Reagan’s biblically-sourced vision of America. This is not the shining city upon the hill. This is not Siracusa. This is Syracuse.
There are about 21,000 students who attend SU. Roughly 15,000 of them are undergraduates. Attempting to describe this population is…tricky. So I won’t attempt to do it outright. I will say, though, that, at the very least, as an outrageously overpriced private school in Upstate New York, SU gets points for boasting a relatively diverse student body. Yes, we skew wealthy. And white. And while I don’t want to stray into stereotypes, you can do it if you want to: cat-calling fraternity brothers; the environmental science major who appears to own only flannel; the suburban-princess-turned-sorority-sister sporting the classic Ugg boot & North Face jacket combo (don’t forget the leggings!); and, yes, if you walk by the street-level windows of Bird Library on a Saturday afternoon, you’ll probably see -wait for it- asians.
And you know what? There might be slight truths to some of these (after all, institutions and cultural norms do play a powerful role in shaping individuals and their preferences!), but there’s so much nuance and complexity to people these days that the amount of bullshit embedded in those stereotypes is so heaping and rank that it is offensive to my mind and nose. I personally know ESF students who openly curse the depictions of them as fugly, mouth-breathing hippies. My roommate sophomore year was from South Korea and, good lord, he was a terrible student. Like, really really bad! He was nearly booted from school for his lousy grades! (Actually, last I heard, he eventually did leave, returning to Seoul to fulfill his stint in the army. Best wishes, mate!)
Sunny days on the quad
The architecture of SU is as impressive as it is disorienting. Lifting straight out of Wikipedia: “The university is set on a campus that features an eclectic mix of buildings, ranging from nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival structures to contemporary buildings designed by renowned architects such as I.M. Pei.”
Yeah, well, I. M. not impressed. First of all, I’d like to see the head of whoever green-lit the of design South Campus served on a plate. There could not be a more cliched model of what housing would look like in some distopian communist fantasy. (Though in truth, South Campus is actually the product of today’s pure profit-centered architecture and real-estate development that largely forgoes aesthetics, which unacceptably drive up production costs.) But I’m mostly looking at you, Bird library. What with your waffle-inspired Brutalist construction. Seriously, who let the interns design that one? Congratulations, you carry all the charm of jailhouse. Actually, if you think about it, Bird library and most prisons have a lot in common. They’re both full of people who don’t want to be there; and between work-study and inmate jobs, that’s a fair number of young people working menial tasks for little pay; and they’re full of gossiping, theft, and even sex.
Now, let me say something about that last point. I knew a girl once who told me that she and her boyfriend had done the deed in the upper floors of Bird. Let me qualify this by noting that, for the record, she gave up this tidbit wholly unsolicited. The physique of this girl might be described at best as lumpy, and she had a running joke of referring to her own body as her “baguette.” (…could not tell if this was ironic or not. Did not press on the matter.) After biting my tongue and giving my head a few forced nods of feigned amusement, she ended her elegantly romantic retelling by saying how her boyfriend cleaned up by tearing a page from a book. A book! Can you imagine, for a second, of being the books? To stand there, at attention, in total innocence and silence, as you witness some slack-jawed dolt bend over his pear-shaped lover right in front of The Birth of Modern Geology and Principles of Sedimentology and Stratigraphy?! To be helpless, together, shoulder to shoulder as that knobby, knuckle-dragging half-wit inconsiderately selects one of you at random from your perch, and proceeds to tear out your insides, all so he can wipe down his gunk-covered yogurt cannon?! Is that what books are for? To be substitute paper towels for some bowl-cut cretin’s splooey-gooey? IT’S A SICK WORLD INDEED.
Seriously, why did anyone ever think Brutalist architecture was a good idea.
Call me defensive because I worked in a library for many years, but if, as a library employee, I stumbled upon two youngsters cautiously fucking in the way back stacks of, say, the dusty, unsullied geology reference collection, mark my words, the beating that would ensue would be but a pleasantry in the making of our untimely acquaintance. And if you are going to commit assault in a public library, I might recommend a hefty world atlas. Barring that, medical encyclopedias can be pretty weighty, as can be hardcover poetry anthologies. (After my sentencing, I should hope to get a cozy job shelving books in the country jail, where I imagine the Dewey decimal system carries over into state penitentiary libraries all the same. Some things in our lives never change, just the scenery.)
Far enough away from the trappings of Bird lies Hendricks Chapel. For me, all roads across our campus lead to Hendricks. It draws the eyes towards it like a magnet looking out upon SU’s quad. And while as a godless heathen I never myself bowed my head or mumbled a hymn for a service, I did witness my share of scholars giving guest lectures there, as well as a very impressive student a capella concert. But the true soul of Hendricks, I think, is not in its tall and airy echo chamber, but below, in the basement, where, if you descend the stairs and round the corners and follow the aroma of bagels and coffee, you will find People’s Place.
All roads lead to Hendricks
I like People’s Place for a few reasons. One, it’s the cheapest coffee on campus. For a dollar you get a sizable cup of some incredibly mediocre coffee. Truly, what other drink can set the tone and pace of your day quite like coffee? After I part with my quarters and delicately accept the caffeinated elixir in hand, I turn and exit, my stride full and heart already heaving in anticipation; I swing open the tall, bulky doors, step out into the bright, crisp air of day, exhale deeply, and think, “Yes, today will be fantastically ordinary!”
The second reason I enjoy this place is that I’m a bothersome ideologue who appreciates the fact that it’s a student-run, not-for-profit business, unlike the stuffy Starbucks down on the corner of Marshall Street. (I don’t think I’ve ever managed to navigate through the haphazard seating there without tripping over someone’s leg or gracing their field of vision with my ass as I try to squeeze between the tight arrangement of tables to reach my own.) And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I had a little crush on one of the employees who worked at People’s Place. She was a cute girl, petit, red hair, who -and I can’t escape this fact- wore mom-jeans. You know, that light-blue variety of denim jeans that do absolutely no favors for the shape of your ass? Yes, those! It was an startling observation, but I was already smitten, and affection has a manner of dulling the eye to faults. Love is blind, as they say. Though I strongly prefer less cliche and a little more nuance. Something like, perhaps, I don’t know… “voyeurism is convenient.” Anyway, there’s really no point in me telling you this. But it does bring up the time honored art of working the Long Game.
What is the Long Game? Well, if you’re complete strangers to each other, it might begin with some unanticipated eye contact. Just don’t get caught staring too much. (Or maybe just go full-stare; see what happens!) In my situation, I was lucky to be able to regularly patronize People’s Place, and buying coffee became a convenient excuse to work game on the regular. Now I’m not saying that I figured out her schedule and started frequenting People’s Place at the best times, but that’s exactly what I did. The goal is to build the complexity of your verbal exchanges. Start with your simple pleasantries. “Hi there!” and “Have a good one!” Eventually, try to find other harmless questions, like asking her to recommend a drink, or asking her if she likes working there. (I am a master charmer, if you didn’t already pick up on that.)
The highest aspiration is to find your in. That angle you can work. Something in common. A shared interest. This is not easy. It really helps if you run into each other in a new setting, somewhere informal, where you can just talk about non-school related matters. If this happens, you can really bust the relationship wide open. You have to understand that when working the Long Game, you toil for many weeks with few results. It’s the preferred strategy for those of us fellas who are more risk-averse, less direct. We’re a sexually frustrated patient bunch. It’s all about dropping subtle hints and allowing them to cultivate in her mind. Soon, you hope, you’ll occupy the space of her daydreaming. And in time you pray for that one chance meeting, for that fortunate turn of events.
My big break only came when I unexpectedly bumped into her at a relatively lame house-party. Trust me, guys, at first, I thought I was on fire! I had a her laughing and all this stuff! My insides were melting! I was brilliant! Then we went into the kitchen to continue our discussion, and, well, I don’t know what went wrong, but eventually she excused herself to go to the bathroom, and after she walked out of the bathroom, she walked right passed me to go back to the room where her coat was piled. Like, walked passed me as if I had never been there at all in the first place. In my mind, I imagined her panicking in the squalid bathroom, her back pressed against the door, texting her friends a flurry of SOS messages. Help me I’m trapped in a conversation. Also I’m trapped in a bathroom.It’s too late for me, you guys should just go dance without me. It’s over for me. Farewell. k bye cruel world.
After that night, our interactions at People’s Place remained surprisingly pleasant, but I could tell the romance was as diluted and lukewarm as the coffee she served me. (See what I did there?)
Probably one of my most spiritual experiences (if I can call it that) of my college years happened not within Hendricks, but outside on its steps. Senior year was approaching its loathed conclusion. There came a frenzied planning amongst us to gather round together for a few last hurrahs, a few more chances to sit upon the coarse, cheap shingles of the rooftops and dangle our legs loosely in the free and warming air of spring, now so fully pronounced. The short supply of plodding nights in which we would resign ourselves to laze about in idleness and dispensable chatter in living rooms dimly lit by trails of plastic Christmas lights, where each of us would sink our bodies into mangy couches or settle ourselves upon sullied, off-color carpets. Weeks of scarcity. The precious remainders.
Late night jamming in the attic.
It was another night resolving at my own place, sometimes referred to as “The Big Red House.” (Nearly all our houses were christened with nicknames.) It was perhaps another evening of lounging about, exchanging the kind of banter that is immeasurably pleasant and yet the details of which are impossible to recall. It was past midnight, perhaps nearing one, when everyone filed out the front door and scattered homeward. But my friend C.B. hung back, probably not yet tired, and suggested adventure. We went out to the front porch, unlocked our bicycles from the railings, pushed off and accelerated in the direction of campus. In a moment we were slicing down Euclid Ave. The oft-congested road was desolate of cars; now it was bare, and yet it still felt almost a transgression to cross over the double-yellow paint with wide, indiscriminate turns. It was the home stretch of a runway, and we glided down it with a rush of briskness and abandon that only the late, uncommon hours of the night can seem to afford us.
Campus was awash in its industrial orange light. The buildings, hushed and unpeopled, seemed sad and dormant, as if they have not been opened in years. My eyes were drawn to the top floors, and now and then when I spotted a lighted window in a row of dark I pictured some poor final-year engineering student camped in an empty classroom, his notes splayed out before him as he musters his strength to resist a cat-nap. Life is scarce around campus past midnight, but chance encounters remain assured. A couple dips amongst the shadows, hand in hand. A young man treks solemnly home, the dusty cloud of his cigarette smoke dissolving into moonlit air. A custodian rings out her mop before heaving it again onto the shining tile with a wet, heavy smack.C.B. and I noticed a DPS officer making his rounds in an electric campus security golf-cart, keeping an untroubled eye on a band of students frolicking about on the shadowy grass of the quad. The panic of finals had not yet spread across the student body. Or maybe by this time finals were over. I don’t remember. But for the moment -whenever that may have been- things were okay. Completely and incredibly okay.
We flitted across campus, coasting at times silently on the asphalt of parking lots and over the bumps of cobble walkways. I zipped across the smooth granite pavers and around the thin, orange grove trees outside Bowne Hall. We came to the top of the stairs outside of White Hall at the College of Law where we rested our forearms on the rocky guard-wall, and looked out. In the foreground stood the towers of BBB, as well as the massive, adjacent parking garage, lit brilliantly and florescent. From this elevation, though, we gazed beyond these, and out into the thick, sweeping dark that seemed to fill the streets afar like water. Distant, nonsensical blips of light peppered the vast, peripheral corners of Syracuse. It was all beyond the bubble. It was the foreboding world that lay beyond the light and the walls. It was right there in front of us, but offered no invitation. Soon, in a matter of weeks, we would enter that world. And yet, for now, it was still out there, anonymous, uncelebrated. We wheeled about and headed back toward the quad.
The steps of Hendrick casted sharp, acute shadows. C.B. and I climbed to the top and sat. The DPS officer was nowhere to be seen, probably lurking about in some other section of campus. The kids from before were still there, laughing and romping about, doing who-knows-what. Except for the glow of lampposts that softened its edges, the quad was a lightless domain. C.B. opened his bag and dug out two PBRs. We cracked the tabs and toasted. In my memory I still recall the aluminum shine of the cans as we tapped them together with a dull click. To what we toasted, I’m not sure. Perhaps to something cliche that nonetheless felt right. That’s usually how it is, anyway. And so we talked. We talked about the important things, like girls and our futures. But mostly girls. And it was good. It was all very good and perfect. How late we stayed out is inconsequential, because good conversation is a hard thing to give up on. And I think we relished in the scandal, even blasphemy, you might say, of sipping cheap beer on church steps. Graduation was mounting like a tidal wave, but I was too busy savoring the cool recklessness of the moment. I loved that night’s almost juvenile spontaneity, like sneaking out the window at a childhood sleepover and dashing headlong into uncertain hijinks.
As we relaxed at our perch, I observed the group of students on the quad. They were freshmen or sophomores most likely. But I remember looking on them as younger kids, more childlike, and completely forgetting the eighteen, nineteen year-olds that were actually there before me. Their simple amusement had such an innocence to it, such a vitality. It gave me pause. Could those kids even fathom how they have been brought together, and soon the very proceedings of their own lives will sweep them up and scatter them come graduation? What, was I now the cynical, brooding graduate? Is this what the four-year metamorphosis was supposed to show for itself? Is it possible that we could arrive at the end of our college years as something lesser of ourselves? As someone who is older but distrustful of the world and its promises? I recoil to think that I would have allowed such cynicism to leech into my character since the first days I stepped foot on this campus. The promise and the possibility of this world must remain to me as bright and unblemished as when I first began, in the latter days of high-school, to carve out my place in it within the utopian power of daydreaming. I want to feel year after new year the sense of nascent wonder and hope that is so often the privilege and glory of youth before things like circumstance and tribulation can strip away their shine.
But so it goes. Often amidst the indistinguishable blur of days at college you’re so focused on other more immediate goals that you simply don’t have time to dwell on big, scary existential matters like choice and regret and identity. In fact, college really fucks with that kind of stuff. Like, really messes with you. Is it any wonder that students drink so much? That all the overwhelming questions of who-am-I and who-do-I-want-to-be and who-will-hire-me and who-will-fuck-me just seem to swell and mount and the pressure builds until suddenly it’s Friday and the whole student body does a collective sigh and agrees to not think about these kinds of things until Monday? I don’t mean to make this all purely rooted in philosophical reasoning. Drinking can be plain fun, and getting tipsy and hooking up doesn’t necessarily warrant an existential analysis. At the same time, I don’t think it’s very controversial to say that the mass consumption of alcohol on college campuses is very much reactionary. It’s a very popular way to numb and depress the constant anxieties that parents, peers, administrators, professors, and future employers are all simultaneously throwing on you. Drinking gives kids a breather from that. Better living through chemistry.
We real cool.
This leads me to my second point, which is the absolutely bizarre social psychology that’s happening on most college campuses, SU included. I’m still struggling to articulate it, but this is something that irked me -bewildered me, more so- in my three years at Syracuse. It’s all rooted in this giant orgy of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Trust me on this, I have a degree.
See, the collegiate world is a romanticized one. It’s a social terrain so bound up with rituals and shared history and pop-culture mythologies that it makes people behave in ways that I think are completely atypical. So many young students arrive here to be socialized by and participate in a culture marked by unabashed freedom, excess, and self-indulgence; by struggle, experimentation, and self-discovery; by sex and consumption and debauchery. I’m not making a normative statement here, not all of these are inherently bad. What I’m saying is that there are some incredibly strong forces at work, and you see everyday how they shape the way kids here dress, act, talk, and think. I’ve experienced a lot of clarity when looking back on my years. And when I revisit my old stomping grounds at SU in person, I often find myself in the position of the foreigner. But even more than feeling repulsed by the behavior I witness, I find myself trying to mentally dissect the madness. So I guess I’m an anthropologist of sorts, relearning the rituals and value systems with fresh eyes.
Where else do people wait until about 11 at night to hit the bar? Wouldn’t it make sense to start earlier and thus end earlier? Seems like poor planning to me. In London, pubs close at 11pm, sometimes midnight, and people adjust their drinking schedules accordingly. (Look, look! Social parameters influencing personal behavior!) Where else do girls, in relieving themselves of the “inconvenience” of carrying a coat, willingly bear the incessant lash of icy wind against their gentle skin while gingerly treading on high-heels to the next house-party? When did self-harm become sexy? I guess I didn’t get the memo. And where else besides college is casual day-drinking not met with concern but actually condoned with blithe encouragement? I used to walk down Walnut Ave. when I lived in a studio on the corner of University and Harrison. As I walked with my head down, past the row of crumbling frats, there would sometimes be a group of brothers collected on one of the porches, like a troop of monkeys idling away the midday. There they would be, tossing back Coors, throwing a football, and reclining listlessly on porch sofas, reviewing the plans for yet another social event that night. And all I could do was chew my lip and think, “HOW CAN YOU DO THIS WHEN I HAVE SO MUCH WORK TO DO.”
Too much of a good thing is called alcohol poisoning.
Now that I’ve passed through the gauntlet, it’s easy to turn around and wag my finger at all these youngsters and their antics. But I think we all have to admit that many of us gleefully accepted this strange behavior as par for the course while we were in school. It’s hard to say. I know I was guilty at times. I certainly had my share of nights when I pushed away from my desk, threw up my hands, and marched downstairs to the mini-fridge stocked with beer. So yes, I definitely played that part. Though I wasn’t always so on board with everything my peers did. Now and then came the time when I also played the wet dish rag. Like when everyone went to Chuck’s.
If there is a bar in Hell, it’s probably Chuck’s. And if in this life I fall short of Expectations and find myself before its inconspicuous and rickety doors, I’ll know my punishment as thus: condemned to languish eternally in this drinking hole of sinners, waiting in wretched despair to be relieved by a last call never to arrive. In permanence I’ll sit at one of those circular wooden tables, my plastic cups of yellowy, room-temperature Miller Lite frothing over because every table here wobbles in a realm beyond earthly physics. I’ll breathe in not sulfur and smoke but the dank, sticky air of sweat and hormones; the putrid mix of desperation and rejection. In my new home, every face and surface appears crushed under a clotted mix of shadow and sickly orange light. I will look down at the glistening floor, sloshy with spilled beer and rainwater tracked in from outside. I can almost view my reflection in it. Almost. Over by the bathrooms, sinners of the female persuasion must languish in a line that never budges. Along the bar, haughty young men filled with lust and gluttony bend their spines over the worn counter and are condemned to buy overpriced shots for ghoulish harpies, only to be led on endlessly with no possibility of a sexual conclusion.
If I could, I would pray for salvation, but no heavenly body above could possibly hear my bootless cries amid the brain-scrambling din of the wall-mounted P.A.s. Observe, for a moment, the horde of mingling drinkers, all of whom, in trying to make simple, honest conversation, are forced to cup their hands and scream into the battered ears of one another. Is that any way to hold a civil conversation? (I guess in Hell there’ll be no chance to do any good flirting. It is Hell, after all.) Even the logo of Chuck’s positively screams Satan: a homicidal clown (with a pig nose) opening his gaping maw, doubtlessly excited for his next meal of mixed drinks and children.
There, from my lonely corner, I’ll gaze at the new souls filings in. They cross the gloomy threshold and hand over their dollars to the fleshy, tired-eyed bouncers of Hell. Then, they stretch out the soft, pale skin of their wrists and forearms to be marked with the black ink of the bouncer’s stamp: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Finally, they briefly amble about before slowly fading into the crowd. They’ll crane their necks to search out the masses for a familiar face before dissolving into the nearest line at the bar, where they’ll wait for only a small eternity for a whiskey sour or vodka & Red Bull. Maybe, while they wait, they’ll strain their eyes at the high walls, now thicker and uneven with layers of paint, and read the chaotic scrawl of their miscreant peers, the names and dates a shared history of something sinister. A testament to mass delusions, to the strange psychology of adolescence, to naivety writ large.
Because I really believe people go to Chuck’s because people are at Chuck’s. It’s a vicious circular logic that props up a campus-wide contentment for the third-rate. I’m honestly perplexed why juniors and seniors flock to this pit every Friday and Saturday, as if there couldn’t possibly be better alternatives. Any weekend night could hold the potential for fresh adventures, and yet we’d sooner trade a creative escapade for oblivion. I remember Friday nights when I would go salsa dancing in East Syracuse; a Saturday evening when a few of us would bang around on the instruments in my attic; or even the countless shenanigans built around a far simpler equation: when our plans would appear stalled and someone would say, “Fuck it, I’m marching down to the corner store, buying a thirty of PBR, and we’re gonna see where the night takes us!”
There is no romance in Chuck’s.
This impromptu spirit would lead us away from Marshal Street and back into the wild safari of the student neighborhoods, where freshmen, sophomores and ESF students stream into the basement watering holes of neglected houses. Scouting a house is a measure of astute observation and exuberant intuition. How many people are lining up at the door, how many noisily congregating on the sideway outside? Quick, what’s the approximate male/female ratio? Is there some sullen doorman collecting a cover? What is the reputation of this address? Can the muffled boom of EDM be heard through the swelling walls?
Regardless of how many boxes you check, all cares may be thrown aside, and you are compelled by a rash curiosity to unassumingly accost the house’s back door, dig a five from your wallet, and receive the branding of an X on your hand from some poor sap who’s clearly just thrilled at having been assigned door-duties for that night. You duck your head down, minding the low ceiling, as you descend the pitch-black stairwell. Then you reach the bottom step, feel the familiar hard cement of the floor, and pour into the phantasmagoria that is the college basement house-party. The first goal is to ditch your coat. You notice many are dumped around and behind the washing machine. But you’re smart. You’re honor-roll smart. You pop open the drier door and throw yours inside. You sly devil, you. Then you turn toward the very entrepreneurial home-made bar, where some kid working for a cut of that night’s profits will pour foamy light beer into your red solo-cup. That is to say, 1 part beer for every 3 parts foam.
In the farthest corner a DJ bobs his head, adjusting knobs and switches, scrolling for the next track on his Macbook. From behind the speakers and lighting system he pummels everyone into a trance with a wall of color and sound. Every sight is partial; each face swimming in flickering green and blue. The corners and walls in this den of sin offer to conceal action in shadow. Here, young men and woman, at once both slackened from jungle-juice and yet driven fierce by hormones, aggressively share tongues in obscurity. Across the room some dopey-eyed boy grinds with a girl, her ass pressing him hard against the wall. There isn’t much hope of thinking straight as the throbbing pound of noise permeates the skull cavity and reverberates through the body. All you can do is feel your way through the swirl of faces. Beer sloshes in your stomach and your faculties become drowned and dull. If you’re feeling bold from the courage of liquor, enter into the muggy friction of bodies, all twisting and gyrating before the alter of the DJ, and then toss yourself into that feeding frenzy of hips and lips and hands. Welcome to college, enjoy your stay.
But, wait, did you catch the hypocrisy? That I curse the filth and clamor of Chuck’s, but seem to relish in it when getting wasted in a stranger’s basement? Maybe so. Perhaps I’m a hypocrite. But the difference between the two is that quality is never guaranteed when scouring house parties (as opposed to Chuck’s, when my disappointment is a sure thing). It’s like playing a game of party roulette. For those of us seeking the thrill of the unexpected, house parties offer us both the highs and the lows. Plus, you get to creep around a stranger’s house!
The good, the bad, the ugly. I recall a night when, on our way home, C.B. and I popped into a real shebang hosted by some architecture students. In a dark and densely packed living room, where lasers pierced the hazy air, we among the countless many jumped in unison to the dynamic pulse of Porter Robinson’s “Language” until, feeling the floor buckle beneath us, C.B. and I anxiously scrambled for the hallway. Other nights I was reminded of the cruder side of youth, such as an evening in the basement of a house party at Fiji, where I witnessed one scrawny, plastered twit openly piss onto the floor not two feet from the dance floor. Later, I saw him mack hard with some unfortunate girl but inches from the biohazard. And some nights are just weird, such as when C.B. and A.M. watched me getting spanked with a short whip by a guy carrying handcuffs and sporting tight leather short-shorts. (To be fair, I asked him to do it. All for a good laugh, you know? Then he ended up being a TA in a ballroom dancing class I took. Ay.)
A friendly whipping
But this was all part of the act, I suppose. Some vague sense I had that it was all proper, even necessary, in living up to the ideal of the college life. That as much as these years were meant to impart with us knowledge and skills, we equally held ourselves to an expectation that we would become dirtied, indecent, experienced. That everything I valued by way of reputation and etiquette could be suspended, so long as it was in service of what I believed to be youthful self-enlightenment. I just wanted to live a little. Or maybe I just wanted to fit in.
And yet whenever I was hoofing it home after a night of vice, I never dwelt upon my place in the social stratum. More likely I was making frequent glances over my shoulder and praying that no one would swoop in and jump me for my phone and wallet. Then I would round the corner of Stratford and Lancaster and breathe a quiet sigh of relief to myself as I bounded up my porch steps and jammed my key into the lock before finally stumbling into the familiar cave that was my living room. Home at last, home at last.
Integral to the SU experience is to take up residence in some creaky house as a junior or senior. That we did, and my friends and I even gave our homes names: RACkerman, Fort Sumner, Fort Tinker, The Big Red House. The latter was my place, and curiously named it was, because only the trimming was painted a dull red, with the sides of the house a beige-grey. It was a hulking duplex worn from years of neglect by transitory tenants and landlords. However, nostalgia has a funny way of transforming flaws into charms.
The house was a labor of love. But mostly labor. Back when I first moved in, my first task of renovation (by order of my mother) was to scrub away the penises that had been graffitied on our door and mailbox. After that proceeded a campaign of less scandalous home improvements. I bombarded the kitchen with chemicals and scraped the charred grime off the stovetops. Natural light did not grace our side of the house, leaving the entire ground floor in a perpetual gloom. To lift this depression I hoarded packs of Christmas lights. I tacked them high up along the walls, coiled them around the thick, wooden columns in the sitting area, and strung the rest throughout my room and the attic. There were lightbulbs to replace, smoke detectors to test, and floors to sweep. There was also an impressive collection of empty liquor bottles, relics from the previous owners, stowed away in the cupboards of the pantry, that needed discarding. My mother did her signature inhale gasp of shock when she stumbled upon those the first time we checked out the property. They didn’t clean these out when they left?! This is outrageous!
I remember the incessant dripping of the broken sink; the insulation, like discolored cotton candy, bursting out of the ceiling in the attic; the broken step midway up the stairs, which we marked with an empty can of Labatt Blue. I remember the spring thaw revealing the buried trash on our front lawn, where I picked up fallen shingles and countless copies of the Daily Orange, yellowed and shriveled, still tightly coiled in their rubber bands, never opened. I recall the morning in which our neighbor returned one of our porch chairs, having abashedly admitted to stealing it the previous night in a decision of blacked-out proportions; or the other morning in which we discovered someone had unceremoniously thrown our porch table off the side and onto the lawn, snapping the two front legs. I remember as winter neared my roommate and I boiling a pot of water for pasta, and simultaneously realizing that we had both subconsciously moved to huddle over the rising steam to keep warm, all because we had decided to keep the thermostat absurdly low in a decision of miserly masochism during those early months. During my stay, I bore these inconveniences with a begrudging acceptance. Today I look back and it is all fond to me. We savor what is good, and leave our smaller troubles behind to wither in the past.
Inside Big Red
Despite my good will, the final of months of senior year were fast upon us, and I became tired. And busy. We all were. And the house began its long slide back into entropy. It wasn’t long before the floors were again sticky and littered with bottle caps. Cans of PBR slowly piled high into a small mountain in a black 10-gallon bag in the corner of the kitchen. Sitting around, I would accidentally spill beer only to recline and put false faith in the idea that it would be wholly absorbed into the upholstery or the floorboards. Our apathy and self-indulgence became manifest. I remember when the batteries for the Xbox controllers finally died, we pillaged the carbon monoxide detectors; on New Year’s Eve we rode the couch cushions down the stairs; when summer arrived and it was time to empty the fridge, we hurled the remaining eggs onto the roof of the detached garage, letting them cook in the afternoon sun. What can I say, it was never really a home. It was shelter, a structure to be abused, leased to us by an unconcerned pair of men named Mike and Pierre. That poor house, it was like a cheap old whore: we didn’t love her, but we sure did have our fun inside her.
The Big Red House
I’m realizing now that this piece hasn’t been very descriptive of actual life at Syracuse University. Much of what I’ve discussed (read: complained about) here regarding, say, SU’s students or its bars, can pretty well describe the situation of many universities across America. What differentiates us from others? We’re not the only school with bad weather or a love affair with sports and alcohol. I don’t really know, to be honest. Generalizations are dangerous, and it goes without saying that I navigated my way through SU in a unique fashion. In my case, as an aimless, middle-class white guy from the suburbs, who studied political science and philosophy, and who was more worried about making friends or impressing girls than about resumes or employment.
I’ve chosen to make this personal, and about memory, imagery, and opinion. My motivations are selfish: I am afraid of forgetting my time at SU. With every year that passes, minute details are evaporating from my mind. In the future when I am prompted to reminisce about my ol’ house, I know the picture will become increasingly blurred. I’ll forget the precise color of the upstairs hallway, the fusty smell in the attic, the violent creak of the floorboards, or the sound of my neighbors voice, as I listened to her sing through the walls, practicing her ukelele. These things will escape me in time. I write to remember.
And is there not a prompt more terrifying or intimate than “I remember…”? I’m overwhelmed by the fact that I could ramble so much more about matters beyond the scope of this piece. (Consider yourself spared.) Facts are blurred, details are omitted, and, yes, some is forgotten forever. As a matter of privacy, I’ve left dating and relationships out of this. My freshman year, which was so formative in shaping the trajectory of my collegiate arc, is listed elsewhere. As is portions from my sophomore and junior years. As I said, the information is daunting. My opinions I hold of every person I’ve ever befriended could each fill a short essay. There are countless other episodic tales of drunken revelry and fleeting scenes of youthful decadence. In many of these, I’ve long forgotten whatever was discussed. I don’t try to imbue these memories with any poetic meaning in hindsight, because by now they’ve become faded and imprecise. What remains is less distinct, more visceral.
Thoughts on a lawn.
It was the halcyon days of April and May. I recall an afternoon when C.B. and I propped our bikes up on his front lawn and scrubbed the chains and spokes clean of rust and mud. It was spring, and I knelt upon the cool, emergent grass, reacquainting myself to its texture. I remember my roommates and their friends unwinding in twilight on our porch, their feet propped against the wooden railings, gossiping while they smoked, putting the stubs out in an old squashed pumpkin still lingering, somehow, from Halloween. Or the times when we would gather the crew and have a rare barbecue, grilling sweet vegetables and Bubba Burgers under an opportune blue sky while listening to a Best of the 90s playlist.
In the last week or so before graduation, I did a lot of walking. But not around campus. I wasn’t interested in slumping under a tree to in front of the Smith Hall so I could soak up familiar sights. No, instead, each morning I filled my travel mug with weak coffee, donned a pair of plastic sorority shades given to me by A.M., and opened my front door to a flash of sunlight before bounding off the front steps and, with quick, full strides, directed my self away from campus. Down toward Lancaster Market, then past C.B.’s place and up Kensington. After I crossed Westcott, the Syracuse Co-Op would rise into view. Passing that, one enters into a more residential area, and for me, the great unknown. I wanted to become lost again, like years ago, when hearing talk of places like Clarendon and Ostrom and Walnut was all meaningless to me.
There were no students to be found here. Instead, families with children. Seasoned adults. “Real people.” As I strolled up and down the perpendicular avenues, I took in the trappings of suburbia: rakes and tools abandoned against garage walls, children who had forgotten their clutter of toys on the front lawn, a garden hose coiled loosely by the walkway. Lawnmowers, shaking and roaring as they do, left the air dusty with pollen, but sweetly perfumed with the scent of freshly cut grass. Strange, for even though I was raised in the safety of the suburbs, the sights and sounds and smells here all seemed new, fresh. The act of purposeful self-displacement proved liberating. So many of the cars parked in the driveways bore alumni stickers on their back windshields, and I found myself making a mental tally for each time I spotted one from SU.
As I repeated this ritual excursion into these outer realms, I quickly learned the neighborhood geography. Dakota St., Miles Ave., Westmoreland, the corner of Fellows and Lennox, where a wooden bench sits inconspicuously in a rugged green space. I walked by these rows of modest homes and tried to imagine making a life in them. Of the simple yet charmed act of walking to the Co-Op each day for groceries or coffee, or tilting thoughtlessly in a rocking chair amid one of Syracuse’s unbeatable summer evenings, drinking tea and listening to the radio. At times it seemed too quaint and domestic. And sometimes -to my surprise- imagining it was pleasant and easy.
At the corner of Fellows and Lennox
I’m trying to make sense of all these garbled scenes I’ve written here thus far. I’d like to round them out nicely with some tidy conclusion. I can’t. What’s disturbing to me is that I don’t really know what lessons I learned from college. There’s a lot of talk about personal growth and discovering yourself. But I have no idea. Did I really change that much? My political ideology continued its leftward march. I found that I could make friends beyond my hometown ones. I learned how to manage heartbreak a little better. I don’t remember the papers I wrote, or the dull routine of classes and eating and sleeping. I do remember the people. So who knows if I “did” college right? Probably not quite. It’s not that I’m afraid to ask myself these questions. It’s that when I do, I’m genuinely left stumped. Maybe it’ll be years until I am rocked by some unexpected clarity. A wise person once re-blogged on Tumblr: “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” No doubt this is true, but hey, I’ve got a lot to do until that time. I’m not waiting.
I glance up from my book. Across the pond, a young boy comes barreling down the hill toward the water’s edge. Trailing behind him are his little sister and mother. They soon reach the water. While the pond is quite large, I can still make out something that the mother has brought along. She is carrying a loaf of bread. It’s feeding time.
//
Feeding the waterfowl is -or would appear to be- a relatively quaint way to spend time with the kids. There’s a whimsical, benevolent aura that underlies the manner in which a mother will take her children to the pond in the center of town during the weekday lunch hour and, very gently, instruct them how to tear up the squares into tiny crumbs and toss them to the quacking crowd. It is, in every sense of the phrase, a white-bread activity. And in a town like ours, whose very symbol is -get ready- a swan, feeding the waterfowl suddenly becomes tied up with the very identity of this place.
To understand the way in which this town (the town of Manlius, New York) has tied its identity with waterfowl, you must first imagine -and this will not come as a surprise, perhaps- that this place does not have much going for it. Well, that’s a tad harsh. It’s an idyllic place to raise a family. There’s a top-notch public school system, a quiet main drag that runs through the town, and the crime is so low that the police have little to do except crusade against speeders and purge the neighborhoods of your occasional high school house party.
Though if in your travels you veer horribly off-course and find yourself passing through this wholly white, suburban commuter town, you will notice that we have a rather large pond along the main drag. It’s length is nearly that of the entire block, and it pushes up against a small restaurant building that, per the decisions of its ever-changing management, has adopted such names as The Saucy Swan and, under the current ownership, Bella Cigna (“beautiful swan”). Certainly improvements, though, from the puzzling and interrogative title it had many years ago when I was bussed tables there- What’s Your Beef? (Or as the bartender at the time would refer to it as in a derisive mock, “What’s your problem?”).
So if one were to stroll along the sidewalk of the main drag, one could lean against the black metal railings and look out upon the pond, like this. Or, from another perspective, try this. However, this pond also feeds into a second pond not seen here. This second pond (where I am reading) is located just a stone’s throw away in a small park-like green space, complete with a wooden amphitheater and baseball field. You must imagine a more natural looking pond without any railings, only a few old sitting benches along its edges. It’s really quite scenic.
The true royalty of the ponds are the white swans themselves, which there are perhaps four or so. Possibly more. Of course, a majority of the fowl population consists of your typical dabbling duck, the mallard. There are also some seagulls, and they seem to be the hyenas of the local ecology, always derided for their selfish behavior, never quite belonging, never quite “of” the group. Just below the sometimes murky surface of the water swim what I can only describe as some freakishly large fish. They are ugly, looming and (for the life of me) unnamed, and, as far as I can tell, totally harmless, like so many hulking, misunderstood Hollywood monsters. I would imagine that if only these guys had a little more (okay, a lot more) collective brain power, they could easily have daily feasts of duck, which, though a vegetarian myself, I am told is quite tasty.
I’ve reserved a special paragraph for the last pond resident, one that is not so high on my list. That would be the Canadian goose. These hefty bastards sport some seriously long, ominously black necks. We do not have a great relationship. By that I mean when I was a wee lad, I accosted one of these fellows only to be bitten on the thumb. Blood was drawn. The grudge remains. The geese tend to march around in squadrons, stabbing their bills into the ground, looking for food. Or, if the mood is right, into the flesh of small children. When not parading around the pond looking to hand out some childhood trauma, they tend to dawdle about the baseball field and shit a truly impressive amount over in the outfield.
//
In April of 2012, a man named Russ Leone was spending his night drinking at one of Manlius’s few local bars, called Buffoons II. (What ever happened to the first Buffoons is, I can only imagine, lost to history.) Well, we assume he was drinking. Because I have never patronized this bar, though I have my suspicions that a gateway to hell might be in there…somewhere. And you can see from this picture, it is the town dive bar, and even when I have walked past it in broad daylight with its front door propped wide open, the darkness in that bar is so total, so unwavering, so mysteriously defying of all natural law that I have never in all my years seen past the threshold of the door. So while I assume Mr. Leone was tipping back frothy, lukewarm PBRs, there is the very real possibility that, being in Buffoons (2!), he might have had his nose pressed to the sticky wood of the bar counter, huffing a line or two. I’m not kidding.
At some point in the night, our buddy Russ must be pretty far gone. But then something that perchance happens to all of us at some point or another when we find ourselves in a state of slurred, drunken stupor. Amid the musty dark and stink of stale beer, a great and noble sense of duty washes over this barfly. Some pressing, immaterial force sprouts in his conscious; some acute charge is thrust upon his chest. So Russ Leone rises to his feet and blunders over to the swan pond. There he snatches a batch of swan eggs to bring back to his den of sin and show off the loot to whoever might still be sentient. Of the eight eggs, all were either dropped on the ground or thrown against a wall.
There’s nothing quite like some symbolic death to bring a group of people closer together. And by “bringing people together,” I mean everyone’s ears in town suddenly perked up, they grabbed their torches and pitchforks, and they came stampeding out of their pristine homes and charging across their finely combed lawns to the scene of the crime, all foaming at the lips for some small-town justice. This is the town that lost its shit. Before you could roll your eyes, local businesses were donating money to a reward fund for anyone who helped catch the perpetrator, whose blood, presumably, would gush forth from the pond fountain upon capture. It didn’t stop there. Amid the gnashing of teeth, an organization was formed. This righteous group, comprised of volunteers, would watch with steely vigilance over our feathered victims until –with God’s good graces– they laid again. This group, named -and I shit you not- the Swan Patrol, adorned pink t-shirts, customized with “SWAN PATROL” on the back and “S.O.S. (Save our Swans)” on the front. These gayly appareled guardian angels patrolled the pond 24 hours a day in rotating shifts. Some kept detailed journals. Others never let the swan leave their piercing gaze of justice. According to this article, they would even call the police at the threat of a potential problem. I guess we should be thankful that, here in Manlius, we only have to tighten our panties over potential problems. We privileged few.
I want to make something clear. First of all, should you read that article, the photo and subsequent text gives the impression that the Swan Patrol is composed of a diverse collection of morally astute townies. It’s a filthy lie. The only demographic I ever observed guarding the ducks and swans (all of which I’m sure were either oblivious to or had well moved on from this) were bored, antsy stay-at-home mothers with strong opinions and rich husbands. And yes, I’m aware of the sexism in that previous line. But let me put their outrage into its proper context. First, the swans ended up having more eggs that season and hatching some healthy cygnets. Non-crisis averted. Secondly, Mr. Russ (remember him?) ended up turning himself in, so they never handed out all that reward money. And thirdly -get this- if you want a real instance of “fowl play” (the jokes won’t be getting any better, folks), I am told by my mother that back in the 70s, some teenager snuck into the pond and beheaded a swan or two. And no, they actually didn’t raise a militia for that one!
In the end, our town mayor at the time (who also had a problem stealing, including this particular instance, among others…but that’s a different story) heralded the new cygnets as a symbol of Manlius persevering and rising up from tough times, somehow also drawing an analogy between this and the slightly improving economy. He lost in a landslide defeat come the following local election.
Welcome to small town suburbia, where the problems are made up and Satan is a guy named Russ.
//
Now, this next part discusses duck penises and rape (which I can assure you was a little weird to research while writing this in the library), so if these topics make you uncomfortable, I encourage you to keep reading, because this is in the name of science, people. At the very least, maybe just replace such harsh imagery by picturing Daffy Duck and Daisy Duck in your mind instead. Or, you know, maybe don’t do that. Yea, don’t do that.
Most birds don’t have penises. Ducks do. But ducks go above and beyond. Ducks have corkscrew penises. And they are really freaking long, and they extend out really freaking fast. So male ducks (drakes, as they’re called) are basically walking around with a loaded gun under their feathers at all times. (For more, read here. Go ahead, click!) But that’s not all. While most ducks get together just fine during the mating season, there’s inevitably a few drakes that don’t make the cut and get “left out.” (Boy do I know that feeling!) And that’s when we get duck rape, people. (Disclaimer, I do not however know this feeling.) Duck rape basically involves the males forcing themselves on the females, tiring them out until they relent. Trust me, I’ve witnessed duck gang rape before while reading at the pond, and it is very difficult to concentrate on your book of poems while this is going on ten feet away from you.
Ah, but in the sexual arms race, the females have evolved! Yes, female ducks have long, twisty, spiral vaginas (as if vaginas weren’t scary enough as they are, fellas, amirite!? Ahem….sigh.) that help prevent an intrusive dick from getting in. It’s rather unnerving, actually. A sexual evolution spurred on by rape? That’s ducked up (bum-dum-tiss!!!). Anyway, beyond that, there is some evidence that 1/10 male ducks are gay, and that there has been at least one report of dead, gay duck rape. That last find won an award. Go figure.
//
Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes, the feeding frenzy.
The family begins to scatter the bread to a pack of mallards and geese nearby. The boy and girl giggle and squeal as they see how close they can get to the hungry, snapping bills. It is only a matter of moments, however, before word gets out around the pond. Never tardy to the party, whole armadas of duck come streamlining from every corner of the pond. Others come from the air, gliding in and crashing into the water before frantically paddling the last few meters to the scene. Soon they are upon the family, and the rest of the pond is left eerily empty. (Save, however, for a lone seagull perched on a rock mere feet from me. Stony-eyed and silent, these are the kind that trouble me the most.) In the distance I see nothing but a mass of flapping wings and rapidly bobbing heads. Dust kicks up into the air. The children shriek louder as the birds close in on them, their determination growing as brazen as their stomachs are bottomless. The deafening violence of the scene is fully pronounced now. I put my book down, I cannot look away. The mother tries in vain to instruct the children where to throw their bread, hoping to steer the masses away from them. But at this point, they don’t even have a prayer. In a brilliantly choreographed move, the geese have chased the boy some several meters away from his mother and sister, effectively cutting him off from help. It is only a matter of time before he exhausts his supply of feed, at which point the geese will silently agree that only his blood will suffice in washing down the WonderBread. A few feet away, it doesn’t look much better for the mother and daughter. In a scene recalling the zombie films of decades past, the little girl is now standing atop the bench, while the flocking fowl gather below, encircling, snapping their frothy bills at the dirt and air, demanding their virginal sacrifice.
Er…well, more or less that’s what’s going on. But the moment as a whole strikes me as incredibly primal. The seagulls are particularly bold. They launch into the air above the heads of the rest and proceed to make incredibly strategic, narrow dives for crumbs. In one moment, there is a shrieking that cuts through the already chaotic clamoring. Two seagulls are wrestling a sizable piece of crust from a much smaller mallard. They nip and stab with their pointed beaks and outstretch their considerable wings as they essentially drag this duck and his prize down to the bank and into the water. Eventually the duck concedes before, most likely, reentering the fray. It is pure, raw Darwinism.
The mother appears to me some kind of god. A kind of Mother Earth figure, doling out her resources to the faceless masses. How is she supposed to hand out the bread? Does she even make an attempt to feed the little, hungrier ones? What is the point- they are trampled by the hulking geese and raging, hormonal drakes. As it so often is, the stronger take from the weaker. What is more, the fanatic crowd seems to teeter between one of extreme want and of extreme need. Not long ago I had witnessed many plump, well fed ducks waddle by my own bench, glutted from the charity of bread, their bodies balancing awkward and heavy above their slick, orange little feet.
But are there not hungry ones among them? Some that, though no fault of their own, can never reach the front of the pack when the next frenzy inevitably occurs? There are baby ducks at this pond, too. Each year an unknown number inevitably do not make it. Or maybe we should not even be feeding the ducks. Perhaps our handouts have disrupted the local ecology and distorted their natural proclivities. And yet does this mob of hungry fowl not recall the throngs of starving within our own species? How comfortable are we with standing by and allowing suffering? My mind grows cloudy trying to draw out the human analogies. I try to focus back to the words on the pages. It doesn’t work. I reread the same lines over and over.
I look up again. And to my realization, after five minutes, it’s already over. The ducks become quiet and slide down the banks. Returning to the water, they scatter and paddle away. Calm is restored to the pond. I see the mother crumple up the empty plastic bag. She turns and begins to walk up the path to the parking lot. She calls to her children, who wipe their hands clean and take one last look as they bid the ducks goodbye. They run to catch up to her.
We all stiffly shuffle toward the steep stairs of the two-story Megabus. Rubbing my head, I had stood up too fast, forgetting just how low the ceilings are above our seats. I gripped the thin, yellow railings to steady myself as I descended down the impossibly small steps. And then, after some five hours in our hulking, dark, temper-controlled bus, we clamoring passengers burst forth, crossing the threshold and breaking into hot, thick light as we spilled out into the curb of Fashion Avenue.
Like some of my fellow riders, I wasted no time scurrying into the shade of just another massive, anonymous building. I stripped off my light jacket and stuffed it into my already bulging backpack. Then I retrieved a Clif Bar to inhale while got my bearings. Looked left, looked right. Er…which way to 28th street? By that I mean: which way to 28th street without looking like a complete tourist? I needed to move north, toward my first destination, the New York Public Library. Once that was determined, it was go go go.
I’m trying to determine what animal is most analogous to New York City foot traffic. Imagine yourself standing atop one of the tall stone or glass office buildings and peering down over the ledge at the network of road and sidewalk and people below you. Surely it must look something like an ant colony on a forced march through cobblestone. Or maybe it’s salmon. I’m ducking and weaving around and through the endless throng of locals and tourists, calculating my pace in relation to those in front of me as to how best overtake them. I will myself to become the alpha-salmon. And there’s the implicit social law of bearing right at all times, though you must always contend with the occasional (either stubborn or adorably oblivious) salmon pushing his or her way against the proper flow. And perhaps this constant pedestrian-evaluation process is not part of the native urbanite’s mind, but I can assure you that as both a tourist and as a person bred in the long, wide, open roads of suburbia , I am making many, many calculations.
And it’s hot and your legs are already chaffing three blocks in because you so vainly and stupidly wore your tightest pair of jeans in hopes of looking your best and the sun is shooting off of everything and into your eyes, which are still zipping about making those neurotic estimations. Its rays are hitting the sides of the financial buildings with their towering walls of glass, making you feel small. Making you know you’re small. Or it’s absorbing into the pavement, reminding you that as a heat island, the temperature is artificially raised a few degrees, and boy do those farm hicks out in the boonies have it good right now compared to you- you who also wore your tightest v-neck. Why did you do that? Keeping up with appearances, eh? Well, we’ll get to that lecture later.
Or it’s glistening off all the pretty people. No, but seriously, a blonde wearing jewelry, touting a leather purse, and rocking aviators? Positively radiant, I say! Electric, really. I could practically see my inadequacies in the reflection of her glasses…if it wasn’t so blinding.
So much for the sun. After traversing a few blocks northward, the navigation of sidewalks becomes more or less automatic. I even feel myself adopting the psyche of a native, becoming notably agitated toward those who absently impede my velocity. Damn you furry fandom people, congregating at the corner and posing for photos! Move aside dudes with questionable immigration status handing out tickets for city bus tours! Watch it, small child bumbling about with large, soft pretzel! Out of my way, cripple!
At long last I had reached my destination: Bryant Park. This 9.6 acre plot within Midtown Manhattan is, in the summer, nicely shaded, and thus uncomfortably crowded. For a basic visual: imagine a large, rectangular, open lawn with shaded seating areas around its perimeter. The lawn, from my refuge in the shade, looked dreadfully uninviting. The oppressive sun radiating off the green grass and the slick, tan backs of those lounging about…it was all too much. The last time I was in Bryant Park was several years ago in the middle of December. The green space is converted into an ice rink for skating, and, as you can imagine, I was fondly recalling such cooler temperatures. I was also dwelling on a bygone chapter of my college years, but that’s for another time. So as I briskly walked between the tables of people chatting, smoking, and looking impossibly literary, I heard a shout.
“Jake! Hey Jake!”
Who, me? I stop and do that kind of neck-craning and eye-darting thing that prairie dogs are known to do at the threat of predators.
Oh, it’s A.Z.! (Name redacted, obviously.) Yes, A.Z. Her prominent red hair was even more so against her dress, which was fun yet professional. Black with white polka-dots. My favorite. A.Z. and I met when we both studied abroad in London. Loud, boisterous, and a skilled drinker, she is nonetheless immensely pleasant, relaxed, her voice marked by its full, confident air. She had just come from a job interview. She was unemployed, but had nabbed a place in Queens with a roommate. During our chat, I noticed she was reading a book of short stories, for which I praised her (mentally, of course). When I wasn’t busy relishing in the excitement of this unexpected run-in (what with it’s astronomically small probability), I was comforted by our mutual unemployment. The fact that she had taken a chance on herself and relocated to an overwhelmingly competitive area code before securing the all-coveted employment I found to be as admirable as it was bold.
After we made our goodbyes, I pressed on toward Patience and Fortitude. If you didn’t know, those are the names of the two stone lions who stoically guard the entrance against would-be noisy patrons and those heathens that would view the NYPL as some kind of tourist romp. Ok, well, the lions don’t do shit against that. But they do look cool.
If you’re looking for a description of the interior of the NYPL, you might want to look elsewhere, because even though this was my second time there, all I’ve ever seen is the reading room. Which is what everybody goes to see. And gorgeous as it is, it makes for a terrible, horrible, absolutely no-good place to go for reading or study. Because, first of all (and I will address this in-depth in a later entry), libraries aren’t always the best places for peace and quiet. And to make matters worse, when your beautifully sculpted reading room is constantly under siege with sweaty, camera-faced bimbos slithering up the side aisles, it kinda defeats the purpose. Sigh.
But -and I can assure you- my purposes were far nobler. Why, you see, I am a man of books. I come from the stacks. I have been on the other side of the check-out counter. Dewey Decimal is a language I speak. Fluently. So you can image how guilty I felt plopping my bag down at a table in the far corner of a much smaller, more spartan reading room off to the side. Besides some paintings of old dead men on the walls there wasn’t much in this room except rows of thick wooden tables sprinkled with people quietly reading and studying. Hence, very few tourists accidentally wandering into here. My goal was to change out of my glasses and into my contacts for -once again- the shameful logic that I looked better without my spectacles. And let me just say- my execution was flawless. Without aid of solution or mirror, I near silently put in my contacts. It was all I could do not to lean over to the two gentlemen reading at the other end of the table and whisper with a smug smile, “Hey, you guys see that? Pretty impressive, huh?”
So, as you may have noticed, I’ve written a reasonable amount about my time in the city. Except up to this point constitutes about 2 hours in the city, maybe not even that. So I can’t promise this whole entry will be a minute-by-minute replay of my entire three days there. You don’t want that, and I don’t want that. Also, given that my weekend is spent with friends, I want to respect their privacy to some degree, so large portions may be left out. This will be easier on all of us, as most of my weekend was indeed spent in the company of ol’ college friends.
Actually, now is a good time to explain exactly what the heck I was doing in the Big Apple. Quite simply, I was seeing some friends from college who now live and work there. Now, for the purposes of this public blog, I’ve changed their names to protect their identities. So for the weekend I would be crashing at my friend’s apartment who recently landed a job doing cool tech work for a fancy glasses company. Let’s call him “Chris.” Another friend of ours -let’s call him “Adam”- was driving in from the state of “Massachusetts” to also stay at Chris’s. There are some other characters that make their appearances, but that’s the jist of it. After putzing around the NYPL for a bit, Adam and our friend “Anne” (who also lives and works in Manhattan) met up with me, and we proceeded to get lunch.
//
So at this point I’m going to jump around a bit and make some general observations.
Class and Fashion
The first is that, Jesus Tapdancing Christ, NYC is crowded. But it’s not even that: it’s that the city is absolutely brimming with pretty people. And…it’s been hard to articulate this without sounding bitter or whiny, but I found it kind of oppressive. I don’t mean that in the typical “heavens, the vast inequalities of class here are so blatant that I can hardly push my glasses any further up my nose in righteous indignation!” No, it’s a little less academic than that (or not?). Quite simply, there was a very palpable sense that a vast majority of people in NYC invest a great amount of time, money, and effort into keeping up appearances. It seems like everyone is desperate to look incredible and appear “on point,” and to express some not-so-subtle cues regarding the size of their paycheck and the proximity toward the “it” crowd. C’mon people, can’t we all just loosen our collars and unclench our assholes for a moment? For a day?
Look, I get it: the good people of NYC tend to have higher incomes and thus more disposable cash to spend on things like fashion. Also, NYC is a fashion capital of the world, so there’s a heavily invested culture of style. However, these things have obvious social and cultural ramifications, so they remain highly relevant. (Indeed, they are the source of the very conflict!) And for me, there’s a lot of competing mindsets here. Part of me doesn’t want to believe that I actually give a damn about the judgments from others. In fact, I kind of enjoyed how completely plain I appeared. “Yea my t-shirt set me back a whole five dollars, and I shop almost exclusively at Kohl’s. Kohl’s clearance, that is.” This summer I’ve been investing much of my reading into such topics as urban decay, poverty, DIY movements, co-ops and collectives, graffiti, freeganism and the various “slow” movements. Obviously not all of those pertain to fashion, but I’ve begun to orient my own life philosophy toward one of simple living, anti-consumerism, and alternative culture. As a socialist, it’s easy to advocate for these movements as part of your ideological obligations (if you will), but for the first time, I’ve actually begun to see a life for myself that is consciously driven and characterized by such values. For example, once my current job is over at the library, I’m thinking about skrillexing my hair and getting gauges, for starters. It might look horrendous. It might not. But I’m kind of tired with this stale, semi-clean-cut look I’ve managed for years. I guess I’m sort of interested in fucking with people’s first impressions of me. At this point I’m simply not interested in living a normal life anymore. The point -I think- is to make others understand that their assumptions about the class, gender identity, sexual preference, or even political ideology of others cannot (and should not) be sourced in how one chooses to express oneself physically through fashion. And at this point I’m probably sounding too academic and convoluted, but this is essentially why some pockets of NYC’s population really bothered me. It’s fake. It’s bullshit. And, worst of all, it’s totally unnecessary. We don’t need to live like this. Not everyone does, but many do. Thanks capitalism Obama.
//
Alcohol Consumption in a Post-College Environment
This was something that I don’t think I realized until after I returned home. Hitting the bars was on the schedule for both our nights. Therefore, so was some much needed pre-gaming!
Wait, pregaming?
Actually I’m not here to bitch about pregaming. Pregaming to me is a study in applied economics. The equation essentially runs as thus: before heading out, intoxication must be maximized while financial expenditure must be minimized. That’s because once you enter any drinking establishment, the rate of financial expenditure increases dramatically, which consequentially tends to dampen one’s willingness to also maximize intoxication. Microeconomics at its finest, folks!
However, I will add that all said pregaming was relatively unnecessary. But it’s tricky to parse out exactly why. Because there is, I believe, a pretty distinct line you cross between the drinking cultures of college and that of “adult” life. Among others, one driving variable behind college drinking (and binge-drinking) is that it breaks down our own social inhibitions, facilitating to more sex. (Or, in my case, lots of great small talk and abstinence.) I don’t think there’s anything controversial in saying that. What I found refreshing was there wasn’t any of this pressure when we hit the bars that weekend. By this I mean 1) it was perfectly acceptable to simply socialize with a drink, as opposed to drink with some socializing, if you get what I mean; and 2) all that pregaming was therefore unnecessary. Obviously much of this is context-sensitive. I could easily imagine a scenario in which we all decided to go clubbing instead of patronizing some Irish bar. In that case, getting shit-faced would have been clearly the morally right thing to do. Anyway, I’m having trouble breaking this down, so I’m just going to move on.
//
What is the city?
This is the last part of this entry, and I’m going to try to piece it all together. The city is an organism of tremendous energy and capacity. One of the most distinct moments of my weekend was zipping through the streets in a taxi. With the windows down, our driver gunned it down the blocks. The cool night air blasted through the open windows and the neon lights washed over all. For me, it approached the surreal. We were once again that little ant darting through a world so impossibly big, its potentiality and possibility so completely incapable of being fully comprehended. The apartment high-rises and office complexes towered in obscure shadow above us. Yet back at the street level, between these canyons of glass and steel, life did not seemed so bogged down in notions of such ambiguous grandiosity. I am spending a weekend in the city. I am here to see my friends. I don’t know, maybe I can’t help but allow myself to be overwhelmed. Whenever I look up at a dark apartment complex, I occasionally see the silhouette of an occupant near the window. Perhaps they are doing something mundane, like folding laundry. Maybe they’re pouring champagne before a night out; what’s the occasion? I imagine what it would be to make a life for myself out of these fleeting, vicarious scenarios. It kind of drives me crazy, but only because it reveals a window into the sheer diversity of human life and direction. Is there someone up top looking down, who, for a brief moment, considers the life of those riding in just another unremarkable city taxi? It’s just a little bit mind-blowing.
I don’t know if I’m ready for NYC. As far as major cities go, it is a juggernaut that stands above others. I did not find London even half as overwhelming as I find do NYC. Perhaps I’d be better suited for a city like Seattle or Portland. (I have been told by several people now this summer that I would thoroughly enjoy living in both.) Part of me wonders, on a larger scale, about the threat of gentrification. There is a very possible danger that the young, creative crowd will be priced out of the major cities within the next decade or so. (Just look at Soho, or look up “the Soho effect”.) For this reason, I think there is great excitement in the prospect of living in one of the several up-and-coming US cities. Such cities, with lower costs of living, are magnets for those who simply can’t afford to be in these epicenters of cool. And so they put down their roots elsewhere and redefine just what cool is, and where to find it. Could I not make my mark there?
But heck, who knows. I’m not in search of a career right now. Or a permanent place of residence. Maybe I’ll travel around for a while and do some more volunteering. A lot of parents I talk to at the library have been encouraging me to see the world. They tell me that now is the time to get out and travel. As one woman I talked to today said, “I never ended up doing that, so here I am now telling you to go do it! Go do it!”
There is a kind of noble pursuit in returning bottles. Since resettling back home, I’ve become more acute to the perverse yet dire and necessary accumulation of money. So I’ve resolved to scrape what honor I can out of this often dishonorable activity. Turns out, it’s not so hard. Every time I have returned home from college on break, I am greeted by a small mountain of bulging white trash bags slumped up against the wall of the garage. See, my family drinks. But not alcohol, really. (Though every time I return cans, I inevitably discover -mixed within the countless Diet Cokes and Mountain Dews- some of the alcoholic drinks my not-of-age younger brother has sneaked and buried deep amid the others. This never fails to amuse, because in time I’ve been compelled to infer that his taste in alcohol is either adorably feminine or shamefully undeveloped, what with every variation of flavored Mike’s Hard Lemonade turning up.)
As is often the case, it’s a noble activity, but not glorious one: the bags are stretched and sticky from their unwashed contents, and that’s only the view of the outside. Inside can only be described as an experiment in new life. The sugary pool that collects at the bottom of each bag emits a sharp and piercing stench that’s been fermenting for weeks, one that’s been primed to punch me in the face the moment I un-knot the drawstrings. As a seasoned pro, I’ve found that wearing a light pair of winter gloves saves one’s hands from the grime that comes with handling something near 400-500 cans, which is what tends to be the average for a big trip (and correspondingly big payload: $20-30!)
And that’s what I’m working for: $20-30. During the whole process, robotic and gross, I’m watching these adults push by with their rattling shopping carts, and I’m wondering if they think that this one young man regularly drinks 6 hulking trash bags worth of diet soda and brightly colored alcohol. Occasionally someone will pull up beside me at the return machines and there’s always this inkling of camaraderie. We the sullied penny-pinchers! We the eco-friendly tight-wads! Today a man strode up next to me with a small bag of beer cans- couldn’t have been worth more than 50 cents for the whole lot. During our brief moment of shared mechanical action, amid the great hot roaring and belching from the automatic organs of the bottle return machines, I couldn’t help but feel that one of us was about to make some small quip or pleasantry. Some cheery note about the cans and bottles of beer and “a fun time last night, huh?” or just a simple but earnest Hello.
I’m not trying to make bottle return into some kind of poetry. Whether or not I approach the task begrudging or with the eagerness for a quick buck, I have discovered that there’s all these pockets of beauty and meaning hidden behind the slime and aluminum and robotic motions. Sometimes you just won’t notice they exist until you decide to write a blog post about it.
(And if you’re wondering, there’s no real tie-in with the quote written above. It’s a line from poet Donald Hall’s poem “No Deposit,” itself a puzzling and haunting piece.)
Somewhere out there, in a major US city, amongst the neon sprawl and dusty air, found in an apartment still lit when most others are darkened, there is a girl. She’s dashing between the small spaces and tight corners of a newly leased apartment, stirred by the promise of her new job in the morning. A mug of tea is already leaving a ring on the new coffee table, ingraining the first marks of a new home. She readjusts the picture frame upon the dresser drawer once again, her touch is frenzied, but deliberate. She considers the morning light. She considers the possible ways the rays may hit the slick, protective glass, as if only certain, particular memories of their shared time could be invoked depending on how the angles played with the colors of the photograph. She begins to cherish the time spent in a way that could only be bolstered through hindsight, the impermanence now becoming so brutally plain and real. At the end of the bed she’s beginning to lay out her outfit (a white blouse to play it safe), like an old practice recalled from first days of grade school.
//
Two weeks in. He’s feeling optimistic: the barista nailed his order (just enough cream to change the color, easy on the ice), and outside the cafe, it’s the kind of weather that seems to uplift the spirits and let loose genius. The sun warms his back, but it’s not an oppressive heat. He wraps his hands around his drink, keeping his shoulders hunched over but relaxed, his forearms resting on the rounded, smooth edge of the wooden table. He keeps attentive amid the hum of surrounding conversation; a coworker will be arriving soon to meet and kick around some new project ideas. He practices in his head how he might greet him, and his choice of diction as he winds his way through the topics and proposals. The meeting has the pretense of being professional, but he likes the possibility that it will be more cordial than that, perhaps eventually breaking down into off-topics about hobbies or sports. Indulging in an unexpected and quiet smile to himself, he suddenly becomes overwhelmed with the possibility of new friendship, its wide and indelible arc laid out to guide him through this new town, this new life.
//
And then, ladies and gentlemen, there’s me. I hope you enjoyed those fictional vignettes. I’m on my second bowl of Coco Puffs, sitting in an off-color love seat in my mother’s basement, watching her discarded rom-coms. Nearly all my friends are gone. Most of us have all returned homeward, scattered and alone again in the post-grad landscape. I think one of the freshly discovered problems of this post-grad life is that nearly any time I do something, I begin judging it within the context of what most people might expect a productive post-grad life should look like. “You there! Are you eating children’s cereal?! Put that down! The only time I want to see you with a bowl and spoon in the morning is if you’re about to gorge yourself on oatmeal (plain oatmeal!) like a pig in the trough!” But really, it’s hard to do things that even seem normal or healthy without considering nagging questions like, “Go for a run? Should I? When there are so many applications to hand in? God damnit, there are jobless kids in China, you edit your fucking resume right this instant!”
I try not to let it overtake me, but it’s a new puzzle to wrestle with. It’s so easy to feel like a failure in these uncertain and malleable few months right after graduation. If you don’t have some job that requires you to squeeze out your eyeballs with a freshly pressed white collar and black tie, then you are a failure. You have let everybody down- yourself, your parents, your college career center, and most notably, the US economic machine, which feeds on bright-eyed college grads like you for fuel to maintain its necessary churning. There you go again, letting down the whole fucking nation! And you know what’s bonkers about the whole thing, when taken into perspective? I live in a quaint suburb and work at a library in the center of a pleasant town. I could, quite honestly, decide to hold onto the job I have there past the summer, save up some money, maybe get a little place nearby, and live a life that is unimaginably more comfortable, well-off, and privileged than -literally- countless millions of people on this globe. Did you know that if you make a little over $34,000 a year, you belong to the 1% of the world? That’s right- the economics of our planet are so fucked up and skewed that if you make what we Americans consider a starting annual income, that you -from the eyes (and wallets) of a vast majority of people on this planet- belong to the top 1%.
BUT NO. IN AMERICA, THAT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO BUSY READING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ESSAYS AND SLURPING THE AWESOME CHOCOLATE MILK THAT IS THE LEFT-OVER FROM COCO-PUFFS, WHILE LIAM NEESON LEARNS HOW TO FALL IN LOVE AGAIN ON THE TV IN THE BACKGROUND. FUCK YOU.
Really, it’s enough to make anyone crawl back under the covers! Look, there’s nothing wrong with having ambitions and even being a little selfish now and then. But do it for yourself. Don’t live for someone else’s ambitions and expectations of you. That’s slavery. Take stock of your beliefs and values, and live them out in a way that is a free and natural unfolding of your own self-determination. Question your parents’ expectations. Critique the cultural norms and ideological messages directed at you, for you. The most aggressively interesting people in this life are those that do this. They take a small moment for themselves, analyze their lives and the world around them, and they reject the narratives that cast things as “just the way things have to be.” These are the characters you will meet in your travels. These are the memorable people who carry around memorable stories to tell. When you bump into one, stay awhile. Learn from them, but don’t actively try to emulate them. Just do a lot of the hard thinking yourself and it will come naturally. After all, isn’t that one of the highest achievements in life? To be a character in the story of the lives of others? (Damn, that sounds cliche, but it feels true.)
So yea, fuck it. I will eat my cereal and watch my bad movies and read these books. Because someday I will be at some jazzy but warm and refined house-warming party of a friend, and I will meet someone, and she and I will hit if off, because somehow we’ll stumble our way to these interesting topics, when we’ll then giddily recount our favorite childhood cereals, or the amazing stories by Wallace that we both connected with when we were younger, or our shared observation that even though Liam Neeson has killed so many people, god damn he looks good in a sweater and he always makes time for his kids. And that will be a great night that I will always remember, even though it hasn’t even happened yet. I can’t wait.
I’m trying to work out a puzzle, it goes like this:
Today I am tasked with cleaning the house. Armed with cheap sponges, burning chemicals, and large opaque plastic bags, I have to deconstruct this place. The sticky surfaces and the dusty corners must be cleansed and made presentable to the future occupants. And yet every artifact I bag up -however mundane or domestic- upwells some relevant memory or thought, once dormant, now fresh on the surface. I have to remove, destroy, purge these cheap and dirty relics, these mnemonic devices.
Tear down the posters from the bedroom walls. One is of van Gogh’s Starry Night, another of two glistening Fender guitars. Posters I’ve had since my freshmen year at Boston University, and never saw any point in replacing with newer, different posters. They’ve occupied the space of all my several bedrooms throughout college. Now to roll them up.
Deafening clatters and clinking as I fill the recycling bin with bottles of Blue Moon, pinot grigio, Stella Artois, triple sec, or cans of PBR (truly the drink of choice amongst my peers and I) and Labatt Blue. Recalling what I can of nights stumbling home drunk and weary after doggedly -yet oh-so hopelessly- trying to talk up cute girls at crowded house parties. Or furiously walking home after closing the bars on some freezing February night, hands shoved deep into my pockets and my nose pointed downward against the biting and relentless headwinds.
Strip the sheets from this now lonely bed. It hardly matters- I’ve been crashing on the couch downstairs for the past month anyway. There was a time when it was our place for cuddling and whispered conversations until sunrise. I guess I was so caught up in the bliss that I couldn’t see the expiration date on the relationship. There is solace in knowing that time wraps me in its slow but unstoppable healing, or the the physical distance between us that will continue to grow as she and I make new treks down new roads, the one no longer bound up in the other. But in the months since, there is no longer any “us.” Us is an unintelligible concept embodied within the bittersweet recollections. It serves no use but pain now.
God damnit, is this a move-out, or a purification?
I pack things up, scrub the surfaces; I compartmentalize all the junk and soon order will be restored. Seems like a metaphor for something, gosh darnit.
There is a kind of therapeutic feeling that accompanies cleaning. It’s comforting to know what all the baggage can be thrown away, and that with a little elbow grease, everything can be made fresh and pretty again. But damnit, I don’t want to feel clean. Sometimes I think I’m in love with my own baggage. I think it’s so important that people read into all the pain that gets buried into their own past. All the filth and dirty secrets. All the private hells and quiet desperation.
I’ve done a lot of walking lately. I’ve always enjoyed going for walks, but for at least the past week, walking hasn’t felt enjoyable so much as it has felt necessary. I wake up in the late morning, brew my weak coffee, and feel something pressing me to walk out the front door and just go. Or during the late afternoon, some urge will bring me to my feet, bringing me past my front yard, and soon around the corners of this suburban surrounding.
I’m not surprised. It’s the end of an era, if you can call it that. If, as a graduate, these times aren’t welling up some kind of war inside you, I think you’re doing it wrong. Now is a time that demands some serious self reflection. And I suppose there’s a philosophical import to the physical act of walking; a forward movement, however uncertain. I wind myself through the residential streets that lay just beyond the zones of housing that are dominated by students. I’ve been intentionally going down unfamiliar roads, taking random routes, keeping my pace to a slower, more contemplative stroll. In this sense, I believe this is some kind of physical manifestation that parallels the current state of my mind.
Out in the trenches of suburban, residential life, I thought about how we college kids often speak of the “normal people,” the “real people,” or the “actual families” that live just beyond us (or, occasionally, amongst us). The semantics is curious: these people are somehow more real, more actual than us? But hey, consider what a unique utopia we college students live in. Where else are we both of and yet also separate from the rest of the public? Universities are often these bubbles within a society, and while they may not have formal walls and gates, it’s rare to see non-university pedestrians regularly infiltrating our territory. Because, after all, it’s ours. The same feeling is evident in our judgements toward the “real” families that still live deep within the tracts of student housing: if you don’t like all the noise and ruckus from our partying and indulgences, you have only yourself to blame, because you chose to live amongst us. I think this is a pretty crude assessment, especially when considering that at the alarming rate of expansion of student housing into previously residential areas, there are families who, only a few years ago, never dreamed that they would find themselves squeezed between collegiate neighbors, who are as transient as they are shambolic.
But I suppose we label our older neighbors as “real” or “normal” because they have already achieved what we students have been fixated to obtain for years: a career and a home to own. The American Dream’s icons of worship. We college students, until then, run the gauntlet of exploitive, unpaid internships and live in our temporary, worn-out duplexes and apartments. We crawl through the slop to chase that dream. And we’re paid little esteem until we capture it. Some people never do.
In the meantime, I’m waking up with not much to do! Time seems to slide along without much direction. Our days here are done. We’ve been waiting for this day of graduation for some time now, and now that it somehow lies behind us, there seems little left to look forward to around here. This is a place of leaving. I look at the porches across the street from mine and try to re-imagine the former occupants, sitting with a beer, smoking cigarettes, kissing a pretty girl, talking with parents on the phone, playing dance-pop hits or country music classics. All they have left behind is the trash and throw-aways that they could not take with them in their leaving, and soon even those will disappear from the curb. Whatever aspirations, dreams, fears, and big-day calender events they may hold now belong to other places, the cities and towns beyond the outskirts of Syracuse. Places that hum to a different wavelength, with populations that resonate to team colors that are certainly not orange and blue.
I’m trying to cram in some final hurrahs with what friends remain around here. The neighborhood is at times eerily quiet. A few stragglers are packing up the last artifacts of their college lives and are returning to where ever they first hailed. A select few, myself among them, will keep our posts until our leases expire or we can no longer endure the bare streets and the quiet interiors of these battered, tired castles, which we pass on to the next batch of bright-eyed upper classmen, and through them our own legacies are borne out, again and again.
I’m going to try to write this entry under an hour. I should be working on my thesis, but lately I have felt my passion inclined more toward writing of the creative slant, and less so of the academic. So here goes!
Today was my first funeral. I’ll jump right into the context:
The “event” was held at a Protestant church. This fact itself does not really interest me, because as an atheist, I was rather indifferent to whatever brand of faith would be wishing Muriel off (and I imagine that, lying in her coffin at the front of the church, she was equally indifferent). Actually therein lies a story: within about the past year, my grandparents and my great grandfather (Muriel being too feeble to partake) began going back to church. This was at my great-grandfather’s request, and it always baffled me. The atheist in me looks at this with rolling eyes, knowing it nothing more than very old people “doubling down” in their ripe age. Religion has never held much of a presence in my own immediate family, nor for my grandparents, so the fact that we now have a few church-goers is kind of a new “thing.” Grace was always passed over before meals, and I never once heard the Almighty God invoked by anyone. It’s still this way, but now I suppose I have to be a little more aware, a little more sensitive, with how my own grandparents are accepting the growing fact of their mortality.
Regardless of my family’s historical ambivalence toward religion, this was not to be a secular funeral. (I made a mental note during the service to make my own funeral egregiously secular.) Actually, one of my great-grandfather’s sons is a deacon in the Catholic church (he’s also a retired police officer), and he helped with the service. I’m not sure how the female minister and he divided up the hymns and speeches and whatnot, but they seemed to do a pretty good job. Honestly, I know so little of the mechanics and duties of ministry that, speaking as someone who has not sat for a religious service in eons, I simply accepted the whole show with a kind of ignorant obedience. (Which pretty well encapsulates most religion anyway, in my opinion. Zing!)
Describing the service is going to be tough, because I lack the proper vocabulary. It felt kind of sporadic, honestly. Lots of “now please stand,” now be seated,” “ok you can stand back up again,” “please be seated again,” and, of course, a mix of us listening to the two priests recite biblical passages, and then of us having to recite passages in our…books? (They weren’t bibles, but books that contained texts specifically for services. Lots of “call-and-response” texts.) Like I said, it all seemed kind of robotic to me. Or maybe we’re just the gentle sheep in the flock. Whatever euphemism makes you feel better.
I myself stayed silent. As an atheist, I have to pick my battles and decide where I draw the lines. I don’t throw a hissy fit if you say “god bless you!” when I sneeze, but don’t expect me to respond with the same silly phrase. And if I do acknowledge your noisy, unhygienic, nasal discharge, I’ll probably revert to the conveniently secular German phrase gesundheit (good health!). And I feel under no obligation to stiffly parrot prayers and devotional passages at a religious service. Yes, even at a funeral. That being said, it was mostly a lovely homily (even if there were some passages that seemed to wade into rather unsubtle proselytizing for the Catholic faith), and I particularly appreciated how the female priest had taken the time to learn about Muriel’s life, which she recounted with such charm and uplift.
In the pew in front of me was my aunt’s newborn girl, lying snug in her carrier, blissfully unaware of the mourning around her. She was adorable*, and I found it a pleasant distraction. I suppose I did make the rather obvious observation about this little bundle of new life being in such proximity to the closing of another life. But I wasn’t about to obsessively plod down that philosophical line.
Ok, so, anyway, eventually the service concluded and these guys came to help bring the casket to the hearse outside. And guess what- it was the dude from the funeral home! Mr. Death! What a guy, what a guy! So the casket is very carefully carried down the aisles (I was waiting for that awkward moment when they accidentally bang a corner of the casket against the edge of a pew…it didn’t happen), and we few follow it. (There wasn’t more than 20 of us.)
I’m not sure how many people on this earth have seen a 95 year old man weep, but I have. It just makes you lose all hope in everything. Because here’s a man that has probably witnessed every possible life experience -good and bad- over the span of nearly 10 decades. Ten. Decades. Not least among them he endured the frozen hell that was the Battle of the Bulge in WW2. And so what you get is not this outpouring of sobs. No, you see a kind of soft sputtering; furiously quivering lips and eyes awash in tears. A normally rather stoic man that relents and allows himself to break. The grief is so pure, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder how much still remained hidden behind a face so aged with time. It’s a hard thing to capture in words.
So out we march into the cold sun, and proceeded to pack into our respective cars, which we drove to the graveyard up the road, with the burial site already prepared. At the grave, there was a few more prayers recited, along with all the rituals of interment. Now, I thought they lowered the casket into the cold earth right in front of you, but they don’t. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so thick as to not realize how hard this sight would be to bear for the most immediate kin. But now ol’ Muriel has exclusive rights to her small plot of earth, and I should think I’ll pay her a visit when the tombstone is up and the weather permits.
I won’t ramble, but the rest of the day was spent at quasi-reception at my grandparents’ home, where we all ate and chatted. At this point it felt very much like a kind of family reunion. I suppose it was nice because there was lots of food, coffee, and beer, and all the conversation was jovial and positive. That was perhaps the oddest thing about the wake, the service, the interment, and the reception: During all of these events, people made such effort to still laugh, joke, and maintain a merry spirit. Perhaps it’s because so many old faces were reconnecting and one couldn’t help but be amiable and sociable. But I also suspect that there is some truth to my aforementioned theory, in which we try so hard -maybe even strain ourselves- to smile and laugh in the worst of times, because it’s all we can do to keep from insanity and despair. I’m not sure if it’s naive, or just plan smart. Hell, I even saw my great-grandfather crack a joke about what an old man he was during the reception. But I loved it: I admired my relatives in a whole new light from how they extracted such cheeriness within an overhanging context of darkness and death. It was a testament to the human perseverance in face of its own stark mortality. Good on us! Good on us!
*And by ‘adorable,’ I mean grotesque. Babies are not attractive in my book. Yuck. Gag.
Gather ’round all ye fellow neophytes to death! I have a report to file.
Approximately four days ago, my great grandmother (yes, great grandmother) kicked the bucket. Ripe age of 89, survived by her husband of 95. You know that by her name, Muriel, she is of a bygone era. Oh, and, I know: don’t use such a snide phrase when speaking of the passing of a loved one. But if there’s one theme I can accept about myself, it’s that I find humor to be a rather automatic way for me to neutralize the emotional gravity of any traumatic or otherwise sad situation. I’m not sure exactly what is going on when I do this, but part of me is inclined to say that I am somehow attempting to separate out the negative aspects from the larger context of the given situation. Perhaps this only reveals a gaping shallowness within my personality, or a striking lack of sympathy. I don’t know, nor am I interested in finding out, because for the moment, I find much comfort in the comedy.
Point #1 of this: In our town, there is a “dead end” street sign right next to the funeral home we attended today. I kid you not. I mean, talk about unfortunate circumstances of zoning ordinances. Observe:
Maybe this isn’t one of those instances when you’re supposed to smile. I’m not sure. What’s truly unfortunate is that, as you can see, this sign is right at the bend before the hearse driver pulls into the lot of the funeral home. So that means every time the hearse driver brings a body to this place to be prepared, embalmed, etc., he has to drive past these words. (Yes, they prepare the body here as well.)
Anyway, moving on. So we walk in, and we’re greeted by the…well…I don’t know what you call the person who runs a funeral home. (Is there even a title for that? Death’s Well-Dressed Attendant.) I’m not sure if I was being purposefully naive, but I didn’t want to assume that the mood in the funeral home was going to be somber. So when Mr. Death directed us into the main room, I thought it’d be a little, shall we say, expected to be all “yes, thank you sir.” So instead I opted for more of a “Hey! Gee thanks!” kind of tone. I think it took him aback for a moment. Maybe he’s so used to acting reserved that he doesn’t even remember what it feels like to be perky and gushing sunshine. Poor chap.
So I stride into the room looking like I own the place, and I greet my extended family with a face full o’ smile. And what do you know, they receive me in kind! So we commence the exchange of pleasantries.
“Hey, good to see you!”
“Oh, me? Been busy as always!”
“Oh I like that…what do you call that? A shawl? Where’d you get that? Looks great.”
“Hey, long time, no see! Lovely to see you as well!”
So I’m off to a good start, shaking some hands and seeing old faces. It’s a small, warmly lit room, supplied with ample seating and tissue boxes placed in calculated locations. We kept the wake small; close family only. Still, I’m swerving left and right in the initial swarm of greeting everyone in attendance. In the rush of outstretched arms and cordial hellos, a few things happen:
First, in a momentary glimpse I spot, across the room, the casket.
Open.
And there’s Muriel. In all her pampered, prepared, and eerily stiff glory. Just…there. Everyone’s congregating and buzzing about at the entrance of the room, and, meanwhile, Muriel lies what seems like so far away at the opposite end of the room, occupying a space of glowing silence. A very small, brown teddy-bear holds the rare honor of being the single item placed in the coffin with her. I know not what emotional place it held in her childhood, now so far gone; I can only assume its deep import by way of its proximity, nestled against her hip. Somehow this material toy -old, worn, innocent- has survived the span of decades as its owner grew from child to elder. I wonder what role it played in her final years; if it could still selflessly give some ounce of comfort or security to her that young children so often find in stuffed animals. Or was this ragged bear dug up from the dusty confines of a cardboard box in an attic, her kin frantically seeking some relic from her life to join her in the journey to the next? No, I prefer to believe the former. Knowing my grandmother’s infectious laugh and dreamy, child-like eyes, I quite easily imagine her when she was still alive, frail and slow with years and yet so too full of heart, taking the small plaything off the mantel and delicately holding it in her fingers, much like the same young girl she once was. And now it has finally outlived even her.
And so after returning to reality from that mental tangent, I’m still making my way through the hierarchy of kinship, finally ending with my grandpa (one of Muriel’s sons) and my great-grandpa (Muriel’s widower). Remember, I’m being warm and bouncy, and I guess I lack the inner tact to keenly readjust my emotions upon greeting the man who just lost his wife. Because I walk up to him and say, “Hey, great-grandpa! Good to see you, how are you?”
How are you?
How ARE you?
I actually didn’t catch what he said. (Knowing his poor hearing, he probably didn’t catch what I said either.) But I imagine it was the most plain and diplomatic response for a man who could have just as easily said “Well, my wife of over fifty years is lying a few feet away from me in an expensive wooden box. And I’ve got to get all the salt off my car, it’s ruining the underside! But other than that, yeah, peachy keen!”
With this in mind, can I just say how absolutely uncomfortable open casket services are? First of all, the poor man has to endure the sight of his beloved wife lying in a casket. I don’t care how carefully tailored the sight of it is, the casket flanked by bouquets of flowers and gentle, delicate lighting; what person would not be driven to wrenching sobs when forced to bear a separation from his or her spouse that is in this instance plainly not physical, but one that only Death commands? Doesn’t that qualify as cruel and unusual punishment? Give the poor man reprieve, I beg of You!
Beyond that, there is another minor irk that cannot be ignored: Over the course of the evening, one mingles and talks with the other members of the family, but no matter how lively or engaging the conversations are, there’s always a not-so-subtle nagging in your head thinking, “You know, our uncle’s trip to England is really fascinating to hear about, and hey, there’s a dead body lying right behind him.” This is a small, sparsely populated room, mind you, and your head is never more than a 90 degree turn from having a glimmering corpse in your peripheral vision. So you’ll be talking with, say, your rather large and tall uncle, and you’ll try to position yourself so that his body blocks your view of the casket behind him. But it never quite works. There’s Muriel. Never letting you forget she’s there. The women really knows how to command a room.
I’ve never been to a wake or a funeral before. (The funeral is tomorrow). But perhaps most perplexing about our wake was that it sort of became a brief family reunion. And even more striking was how the atmosphere -to me, at least- immediately took on so much less of the sober and solemn traits of a wake, and more of all the nuances and awkward circumstances of any social gathering. I mean, there I was, trying to strategically associate myself with the conversation circles in the room that contained those I wanted to talk to, while attempting to simultaneously avoid the relatives whom I knew less. And of course, I’m doing my best to make good conversation, to be pleasant, to be relatable. I might as well have been at a college party! And what the hell do you talk about at a wake, when there’s a stiff in the corner of the room? I mean, seriously, what’s appropriate? Baseball? The weather? Cooking? I tried to hover around my uncle Jacques (He’s French…but really he’s just from Minnesota.) His own nerdy awkwardness makes me feel less so. (He is also a brilliant guy; professor of classics.) So eventually he, my two other uncles, and I settle upon…politics and religion. Somehow we avoided any instances that would have otherwise been controversial or offensive. True conversational acrobatics, I say. We discussed the culture and politics of South (and North) Korea, and then bounced around such topics as the history of West and East Berlin, ethnocentrism and racism in Asian cultures, and jokes about the Ten Commandments. Trust me, there is a connection between all of these, but I have not the time nor energy to explain it.
Eventually it was time to end the wake, so we shuffled out, rather unceremoniously I’d say. Perhaps that was the most honest thing we could do. Try as we might, there isn’t much anything that is ceremonious or graceful about death. Everything about a funeral home tries to ease this ugly fact through presentation and appearances. The body is dressed in clean clothes, the face is made up, the hair is perfectly set; the lights are a glowing, soft tone; the walls are neutral colors with wood trim, adorned with paintings of landscapes; the chairs are comfortable, the tissue boxes always conveniently at hand. Nothing announces itself too loudly. Everything has its place. All is methodically crafted to better guide the guests through the grieving process as gently as possible. It is a place decorated and designed with suffering in mind, because suffering here is certain. Should I be grateful for the utmost care and detail put into this space? Or made uncomfortable upon realizing the artificiality of it? Does the man who greeted us at the door even mean the condolences he speaks, day in and day out? Does he give second thought at the sight of a dead body? Do the images of them pervade his thoughts and dreams, or is he so engulfed in routine death that he has the rare gift to, as you might say, “take it for granted”? Has he ever given pause upon considering the quirky fact that each of his paychecks is necessarily resultant from the death of others and their kin subsequently utilizing his services? Does he obsess about his own inevitable death, or is he finally numb to it? There was a moment during the wake when I slipped out into the foyer to do two things:
1. I was curious if the funeral home had made itself a check-in location on Foursquare (Answer: no, it hadn’t.)
2. I was seriously considering asking this funeral home manager how he got into his line of work. I mean, honestly, is it something you aspire to do, or do you just sort of fall into that job by unplanned circumstances? I was desperately curious but decided not to inquire. Alas, I regret it!
Alright, let’s conclude this entry here. The actual funeral is tomorrow, so I’ll have a follow-up to this entry sometime either tomorrow or very soon. Stay tuned, folks!
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