|
*
1 *
Beware
the life you earn.
Most
days I can't take a drink quick enough. Then I wait for that moment. A
square of pure light to open up in my head. I peer inside, looking at
the many things that I could, if I wanted to, still be. Time being elastic
during these moments, it seems like my entire youth is still before me,
instead of already half over.
I
could be a writer . . . I'd been saying this for years, but the furthest
I'd gotten was only to try out sentences in my head like a radio broadcast
formulated to pass terse comment on my life and on others', but which
I never bothered to write down to see if I had any of the essential ingredients:
clarity, focus, insight, concision, the ownership of something to say.
I needed to muster a continuous sobriety, instead of the intermittent
bouts -- full of great, promising starts that go on to crash with a condemnation
best described as orchestral -- that kept passing through my life like
a tease of the worst sort. A writer, hmmm, a writer. I knew how to type,
that was one thing. My mother put me in secretary school to get me out
of her hair one summer. My fingers danced on a keyboard, revealing their
autonomy from the rest of my body. For several years that was how I supported
myself. I worked typing up the awful, turgid manuscripts of wannabe writers
-- I charged seventy-five cents a page, undercutting the going rate of
a dollar a page. Looking back on it, I realize that that was a stupid
thing to do. This was before the predominance of the personal computer
when every white-out-covered mistake stood out on the page like a signal
flare. My typing was immaculate. That alone would have recommended me,
guaranteed that I got more work. Why did I have to continually undercut
myself, filled with the pathetic belief that I was a loser with a target
on the forehead? Well OK, I am a loser, but hey, my typing speed: it was
in the range of 120 words a minute. And the mistakes, no one could find
any.
For
a while I answered phones at an employment agency, a job requiring a good
voice -- which I had -- and only light typing skills. But that didn't
last long because I soon discovered that I resented having to speak to
people. My hands were all I was willing to give. Take my hands, but leave
the rest of me alone. And also, it required me to appear presentable,
and I was still young enough not to see that getting out of bed and going
straight to work bringing the face that I had acquired during the night
was far from socially acceptable.
Today,
it takes me about forty minutes to an hour of reviewing myself in front
of a mirror before I'll step out. I want to minimize the chance of anyone
pointing to me on the streets and laughing, echoing my thoughts. This
is my routine: I wash my face to get rid of excess oil, put Chap Stick
on my thick lips to replenish the moisture that washing accidentally takes
out, and then comb my hair and set it in place with hair spray that I
choose for the ability to hold but not stiffen. By the time I get out
the door, I'm about as human as I'll ever be.
Then
I was a mail clerk for the city's Workers' Compensation claims department.
I pushed a metal cart that was a bulkier version of a supermarket cart
up and down three floors, distributing mail that I had previously sorted
and then rubber-banded together. I would leave these packets at the desks
of the lawyers' secretaries, whom I didn't get to know beyond their bright,
sunshiny names: Mary, Violet, Clarita, Sara, Jamina.
Later,
I worked as a data entry clerk for Arco, the big oil company notorious
for owning the tanker that spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into
the waters surrounding some part of Alaska. My stint there was postdisaster,
but it didn't seem to have bothered me one bit. This is what I'm trying
to grow out of: the unwillingness to see that I am connected, even if
by the thinnest of threads, to everything else. I remember only that I
sat on a stiff chair that had wheels which I couldn't resist sliding back
and forth, back and forth, to alleviate the soul-destroying repetitiveness
of my task. I stared into a green screen; that at least was helpful. My
favorite color, the color of trees, of grass, of certain kinds of ice
cream that tickle the tongue, ice cream with names that seem like nothing
remotely sugary could be extracted from them: avocado, green tea, pistachio.
The screen was green, and the cursor blinking to be filled in like an
outstanding debt was a lighter-shaded green, psychedelic in its insistent
winking. I keyed code numbers into the boxes that asked for project headings.
What these "projects" were I was never quite sure of. I typed names of
employees, their titles and designations, locations pertinent to these
reports, comments. Comments written by whom? Come to think of it, I wasn't
sure of anything that I was typing. It all became abstract: merely speed
and touch; keystrokes like paddling in water until I could get to the
first fifteen-minute break.
I
was supervised in this job by a kindly black woman who looked like a newscaster
with her helmet of stiff hair and her repertoire of suits and skirts that
always made her look older than she was. Whom did she go home to at the
end of each day? It made me sad to think of her unlocking the door to
an empty place. A pet -- a cat perhaps -- the sole witness to her life.
But how come that sadness never touched my own thoughts about myself,
when the same scenario,-- minus the cat -- was the exact one I lived through?
Well, for starters, the word "bachelor" seemed fine, unlimned by bad vibes,
unlike "spinster," a word conjuring a winter tree, spindly branches reaching
upward in torment.
And
then through referral from a friend, I went to work for an old Jewish
woman, a survivor of the camps who paid me to type up her memoirs, which
she dictated on the spot. The job was frustrating because it required
me to supress my natural instinct to improve on another's words. Her grammar
slipped in and out, in a touching way that I've only seen white people
pull off. Have a colored person speak the same way and immediately you'd
yell: English only! And also, her locution was disastrous, sentences that
snaked back and forth and then back again until you weren't sure how everything
had begun and where you were in relation to two beats ago, in a way that
I'm sure would've sent James Joyce into fits of epileptic jealousy. A
joke about Irish writers, somewhat applicable to this Jewish woman: Get
to the verb!
Here
is a sample sentence:
Nowadays
walking these ugly gray streets called New York City and seeing American
friends going from shopping back to house and we stop on the streets and
say many things, saying hi, things like that, also we ask each other about
so-and-so, how is so-and-so we ask, and usually so-and-so, for example
Mrs. Heifetz from originally Kraków, is fine, always fine, maybe a little
under the weather, maybe suffering from like King Lear where the ingratitude
of children is sharper than a serpent's tooth, but always, still, fine,
and then one day I will hear that so-and-so is dead, and of course immediately
I think when will be my time, but after that, I always think, my God,
Mrs. Heifetz the Nazis did not succeed in killing, but eventually she
is gone to pneumonia, or high blood pressure, or arterial blocking, you
know what that is, that is thickness of the blood in the heart or somewhere
that blocks the blood from getting to your parts, but that is not a feeling
that's so bad because eventually we all have to go, but what is worse
is this other feeling, this experience of walking the streets one day
and you see a revelation, my God right there half a block away from me,
standing at the corner of Eightieth and Broadway near Zabar's, my God
isn't that Mrs. Heifetz and you go running, screaming all the time, Mrs.
Heifetz Mrs. Heifetz! and you look closer and it's not Mrs. Heifetz at
all but someone with the exact same face but a different name, and you
become ashamed of making such an unnecessary farce, I mean fuss, and after
shame comes such a sadness, big big kind of sadness, like you realize
the streets are full of ghosts now, more ghosts than living kind of people,
and the way someone stands, something very simple like that, or the way
the sun happens to be hitting someone's face or their clothes, will bring
back for a very brief moment, your entire life of friends and acquaintances,
and yes, even enemies who are now all dead and who you wish they were
alive today so you could forgive them, and yes, be forgiven by them, because
life, yes life is so precious.
How
did I know that that was one sentence? Well, the woman spoke so fast that
the comma seemed the only response, like those notations comic-book writers
would put at the heels of superheroes to indicate flight, or departure,
which was exactly the way she spoke.
She
called me boychik, her voice going up and down, and it made me
afraid because I thought this meant she saw through what I concealed from
her: that I was a big fag: chick boy. But seeing my face seize, she explained:
It's the word for young boy in Yiddish.
But
all these were things I had been. What would I be?
This
was exactly my frame of mind when, sitting at a bar in the Times Square
area called the Savoy, a place frequented by hustlers and transvestite
hookers way past their prime and by junkies who resembled stick figures
and moved as if struggling underwater -- a bar I went to because I liked
its sad, defeated air, and because it helped remind me of everything I
was afraid of becoming -- it was while sitting in there, nursing the first
of what would be a million shots of cheap tequila, that Shem C walked
into my life.
Copyright
© 2001 by Steven Ong. All rights reserved.
|
Top