August 7th, 2023 - Yogurt Days
Dear TNY,
The Monday’s keep coming, and I hope they always will, and on this one you gave me “Yogurt Days”.
It’s okay. Only okay. I say that because I could see what it wanted to be and it didn’t get there. And what did it want to be? This:
…so much holiness in that little bathroom.
Now, if it could have pulled that crescendo off (and ended closer to it), boy howdy we would have had something. But, a couple of things got in the way. The story is in first person, so we have a built-in closeness to the protagonist. But I couldn’t seem to shake the sense that the protagonist was a boy. It took until page two for the author to identify and then, later, after a whole bunch of non-identifying content I got hit with another identifier. So, is that the author’s fault? Maybe, for not squeezing the she/her closer to the front. BUT, is it my fault as a man that I overlaid my gender on the voice? Well, that’s an interesting statement. Is it my fault I overlaid anything? Yes. It’s likely a default function in most of us to overlay our own consciousnesses and biases, something the woke side of life is trying to beat out of us (also, guys, shaming will never be as powerful a motivator as love, so maybe change tactics away from “beating” (also, even though I know this about shaming, I know that I have obliterated my children with shame in ways that will take years to sort out because I’m a fucking monster)). But is it my fault that I overlaid a male persona? No. I didn’t ask for all this. It came special delivery, rope after rope of Dad-jizz fired in salvos into my Mother’s honeybun (“Yogurt Days” pun, anyone?!). Eat that, motherfuckers! I’ve been paring down my friend Ben’s memoir to make his own, special, first person POV obituary and his mind is rubbing off on me. More on that in a minute.
Anyway, I’m not sure who is at fault for the male/female thing. Likely me. But, the issue at the crux of disconnection here is voice mismatch. The narrator is an almost-twelve-year-old girl. And it nearly reads like that for the first 90% of the story. Except it doesn’t. It’s trying to read like that, and that’s what feels off. The trying. And that gets even more complicated when we arrive at the totally unnecessary ending to the story in which we hit warpdrive into her future when she’s a mother of her very own. So, the overall effect is that most of the story’s voice sounds like an adult trying to dumb-down or simplify language and experiences until we hit adulthood, and then it sounds like a kid trying to fake being an adult. So I couldn’t really buy in because it was mixed messaging throughout.
Which is a real bummer because the payoff in that little bathroom with the naked man (AIDS patient?) could have been fantastic.
Oh, I couldn’t keep any of the characters apart.
There you have it, as told from the dining facility at The Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California (soundtrack provided by Downtown Binary, “Atlantis”). I’m here for a writing conference thingy. Feeling like 1) an imposter and 2) that I am not with my people. I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. When all the writers rolled in. I didn’t see my people at all. But they saw theirs. New groups formed. Laughing ensued. Stories were told. I sat on a faded teak bench and watched these wispy, finger-like clouds move past big oaks and gum trees and mostly no one talked to me. Which is fine. These are not my people. Then an older woman in a pink sweater came over and sat down next to me and we drank champagne and talked about galvanized pipes, her age, her husband (RIP five years back), and I watched the skin of her face, noting all the wrinkles, and the knuckle bones in her hands and the way that everything that I said, according to her, was exactly what she needed to hear and that young plumber back in Tucson is going to get a talking to later this week.
What I’m trying to say is that a decade ago I walked into a room in Anchorage, Alaska in a building called Gorsuch Commons, with my stupid little nametag around my neck and I thought I knew everything (I didn’t and don’t know shit). And within 30 minutes I was drinking beer in a dorm with two men that I have grown to love like brothers. And now one of them is gone. And I thought, guys, that they were my people. And they likely are. But, I think maybe he, Ben, was just gracious with his time. Giving attention to those of us who could not even articulate how badly we wanted him to pay attention to us. I was watching The End of the Tour yesterday and the narrator was talking about how people didn’t read David Foster Wallace because of the plot or anything, they read because they wanted to be close to him. To experience him. And at the end, the narrator is running around the house just naming objects. Trying to collect it all. To hold that moment he knew he’d never get back again. That’s what Ben was to so many of us. He was giving all of us the gift of his time and attention, which hurt him very much to do. Seemingly his whole life. So yeah, I thought he was my people. But I think he’s with his people now. Gone back to where he came from. The place that makes people like him.
But for a minute he made us all feel like we were special. And that’s got to be good enough because we aren’t getting any more of that. The factory has been closed.
What else, what else.
I finished the rough draft of his obituary last night. Do you know what it’s like to use someone’s own words to write their obituary? How I don’t want to get my hands too deep into him, you know? To have it still be him. It’s so intimate. I wished I was smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and his voice was audible in the room, laughing with me as I can’t figure out how to keep the first reason he ever wanted to kill himself (at 13 years of age) because it does not belong in an obituary but I want it in there so badly (for you guys, because I demand that you get to know this man, I have included it right here; if this shit doesn’t make you laugh then you are what’s wrong with the world: No, I was suicidal because I believed I had contracted HPV from a toilet seat in my grandfather’s house that was known to have been used by a cousin of mine who, “everyone knew”, was not a good Catholic and ran with “thugs” and likely had been rawdog with not just one but many and obviously had the STI that I’d just learned about in middle school sex ed. I knew it. The evidence was incontrovertible and here I was, transmitting that same infection to my unwitting family by lieu of our own toilet seats, hiding the information from them out of guilt and shame, a pathetic wretch giving everyone in the trailer warty junks. How could I face my father and tell him his dick was now destined to become cauliflowery? Or my mother that her cunt would likewise bloom? The only option was to alleviate the shame of living by the improvised rope.). So yeah, I’m submerged in a man’s life who is no longer alive and I don’t know how to let go of him yet his death cannot be real because he’s everywhere around me. He’s in my fucking words, people.
My kids and I left Hawai’i, too. We flew out Saturday night, landing Sunday in Seattle quite early in the morning where I escorted them to their flight before hugging them both and breaking into tears while telling them I loved them very much and that I was thankful for their time this summer and thanked them for entertaining my idiotic notions of adventures with one’s kids. I told them they were spectacular swimmers and funny and smart and so goddamn dumb that even desperate ranch hands wouldn’t use them as fence posts. I told them what little I could before I choked up so hard that I couldn’t talk. Then I hugged them again and turned my back on them, leaving them to their own devices, and walked to a train which took me to a plane which whisked me away. And I have done this so many times in life. I look at their faces with an ocean of love in my heart, and I leave.
What a fucking terrible human I have become.
They have made it home safely. They will not think back on these moments the way I do. At least not yet. Maybe one day they will hear this melody that I’ve been weaving into their fabric. It was there all along but they just couldn’t tune in. But one does not know. One never knows anything, really.
Last week it was said that I was the token sad person. I don’t think I’m sad, though. It isn’t like that in my heart. It’s like the whole world is in there. All the beauty. Even the beauty that comes along with sadness. The boys stupid, uncrying faces at the airport. Ben’s ragged, thin, yellow body shaking at the hospital. My father’s eyes rolling from the medication as he fought to take his oxygen mask off to leave an unwatchable last message to his adult children. The way my brother’s toes curled like fiddleheads after they unplugged him and his body scrunched up, looking for air. The wizard sending me a text that says something along the lines of “when they die, you don’t punch them in the face”. All the emails from people who got their fathers back because I sat down to write about how much I love Kong. These fucking clouds shaped like fingers and this lady’s wrinkled hands and the poem last night about how badly this woman wanted her husband to ravage her again. Guys, it’s everything, all at once, and it's all so goddamn beautiful that what else am I supposed to do but cry. No, it’s not sadness.
It’s fucking Love.
Well, here we are again. The ramblings of man in shambles. But maybe, take a deep breath and come sit with me on this bench. Hold my hand. And let’s watch all this play out. There’s a lot to see yet. The next act is starting. I bet it’s a good one.
Nick
