My Mixed Company

I am halfway in it when I see the steamed windows across the street go from yellow dripping sweat to humid dark sleep. Lights out, Savasana. I thump one hand down on my cocktail napkin to keep the sweat from my own rocks glass from picking up the damp square as I lift/swig. I thought of here, so I came to here; a long dark bar with shapes of regular, belly-up men talking the same old shit, a flat screen, a bartender who asks where we’ve been and tells us he’s missed us, the same rocks glass with that unmistakable seeping in that takes the wince out of my day and makes me not care about my inadequacies that have stacked up: The next hole I had to allow on my brown belt that I wear almost every day, The way I said that thing that I should not have said that I know will come back to bite me in my most valuable places when I am least expecting it, When I said yes when I felt like saying no, Vice versa and then switch it eight times over. This is the day that takes me to this place.

I watch as the lights across the street go off and I know what it means to the 40 glistening people in that room: We can rest, The day is over and we did the best we could, We are spent and sleep is a luxurious treat that we have earned and we get to have all of it.

I drink in my safe neighborhood haunt as the yogis–four car widths across Broadway–burn off thier last pose and try to feel lighter while finding Light. For the first time I remember this feeling and completely yearn for it; the end where you are a rag, wrung out and flattened to the mat, knowing that you just did something here, letting a Light enter.

It is possible to find some kind of God. And I don’t care what people say. There is a way to move, that pushes you to the edge that brings forth a kind of light that you can’t get from a bottle, or a sermon, or a group of people who convince you they know more. Even more than halfway through my night’s share, belly up to my favorite place, I can look across and remember that there was a point when all it took was for me to push my body to feel a certain Light that no thing or place can bring, and all that separates me is an avenue of rushing cars and some fear of being better than I am right now.

There are sluts all around us. Sweaters are turned into tight dresses with thick gold belts; butts and breasts burst. We stand on line for tarot card and palm readings but the turnover is low so we send some lame volunteer from our department to keep us from drying out while we wait. We shout drink orders and shift from one foot to another trying to make chit chat with people we only see during office hours when we need the copy machine fixed, or a car booked. An HR assistant scurries up the stairs and announces that the entertainment is here.

“You mean like in the “Bird Cage”?” One woman swoozes when told of the act that will go on soon.

I go for fabulous over future and ditch the line to hussle me and my white wine all the way down to where Lovey stands in the spotlight with a guest who is thirty pounds lighter, many inches tighter, and ions younger than Lovey could ever wish to be. “This is Ashley,” Lovey breathes into the mic.

Of course, Ashley.

“She’s fierce”, my friend says about Ashley who looks like Gina Gershon with a boa, tousled hair and legs that look like Central Park, halter-topped, roller stars from the 80’s.

“Supposedly”, I roll back while I wait for the real act. Because anyone who has seen drag KNOWS that it’s always the old lady who kills.

“It’s Raining Men” booms through the shoddy speakers, Lovey flounces in a red tent dress with reinforced-toed Leggs stuffed into $13.99 Payless slingbacks. She laces her way through “I Will Survive” in her bouffant and cat eye mascara with limp wrists and jumbled lip-synching while pointing to Ashley; encouraging her to cycle her stilettos in runway fashion in and out of the audience; breaking the sea between corporate and retail.

I deflate.

I thought we were going to see a real queen. An old girl who loves being a woman. One who understands the tennis balls a calf muscle can make in the proper heel. A veteren who can toss her hair and turn the heads of any Wall Street banker. But we are in West Palm bingo land tonight. We’ve got Lovey in Easy Spirits in a cloud of Aqua Net, using hands instead of wannabe hips, and light toes instead of ass and thighs.

The song ends and Lovey dashes to the mic. All of a sudden she is luscious and dripping in her British accent and it’s then that all the people fall in love. Corporate suits raise a glass and people who would otherwise be caged in an office at this hour tilt their heads.

“Thank you for tonight,” Lovey says, ” And thank you for understanding.”

And it’s then that I get–for the very first time –why I love this whole show, no matter how weak and flouncy, passionless, ill-performed, or flimsy it is. Here is my 101 on how to become your own star.

You are welcome for understanding.

My very favorite coffee lounge in the city has closed. I loved to picture myself all cozy in the end nook of the ratty couch in the window, just sitting there with my journal and a latte. I blame my apartment for the inspirational radio silence and now I can’t ever go back to that little lounge because it doesn’t exist. Not that I went there that often. I only went there three times, or maybe four, but that doesn’t matter because it was kind of like this beacon. I could sit here in this studio and file my stories into these little, puffy, donut shaped inflatable mailroom cubbies in my brain and not have to write them down because I could wait until I got to my favorite coffee lounge.

I have constructed perfect sentences that have changed the world and invented new theories on love and heartbreak, entire families have been killed, crack babies have been adopted and I’ve called out sick with a terrible case of camel toe. My cubbies are about to burst.

All day long something happens and the ideas liquify and push against the sides ready to pop all the little water wing cubbies that keep me afloat during the hours that equal out to the things that make us all so yawningly the same.

I watched the grumpiest little black girl on the train today. She had that dried drool thing going on, just this little canyon streak chalked on to her face, her pink backpack was the same one as her sisters were wearing. They tried to include her in their chats and games, and it seemed to me to just be a case of how one deals with morning. Simply this: they were morning girls and she is not. I couldn’t take my eyes off this twisting girl– almost ready to cry–she was so not ready for the day. Her profile curled up at every turn it possibly could, she was sea waves with eyelids that dipped down and thick half-moon lashes that peaked at the top, a nose that sloped and then perked right up like a sundae with a cherry on top, her upper lip toppled over her teeth but her bottom lip was there to catch it and lift it in the most dainty little way. No matter how frustrating the day was turning out to be, she always looked ready for a little peck. How can life be so grumpy when you’re wearing Osh Kosh and you’ve got a face that reminds people of sea waves?

I wanted to write five stories about her right there, just then, but that thing about the coffee lounge has got me worked down. I so wish my passion was a real passion. If it was it would have the face of a sea wave and I’d let it take me anywhere and not be afraid to write about it on the spot, couch or not.

He’s coming home in two weeks, but I’m a big picture kind of girl so he’s already been back and we are three months into it. I’m scared, I told him today when he called. Scared of me, he asked. N-n-n-ooo, I said, and a million o’s floated like bubbles over me in my bed on the phone.

What are you scared of?

And there was a pause with a little static and the russling of sheets as I pressed play and the movie reel started, the one that is mostly of just me and him that I’ve spliced together all summer. Here we are in bed eating pizza and watching movies, here we are at the bar getting drunk and talking about music and heartbreak, over there we are back in bed and talking about getting up and not getting up, we are taking fitness walks on the promenade and making promises to eat better, he’s calling me at work to ask what we should do for dinner, there I am snoozing through the alarm for just five more minutes…I so desperately want to call in sick. I fake cough and say to him, do I sound sick? Do I sound sick now? How ’bout now?

There’s more of this pause while I finish my reel.

I’m afraid you pose a threat to my schedule, I finally said.

I pose a threat to life as you know it, he replied.

And then we both laughed.

I ran after him, bursting through the metal door. The heavy exit bar of the door clunked down, stuck, and then bounced back up with a delayed thunder that startled passersby; people who had been quietly dragging fresh trails in the snow that had been collecting while we had been trying to sort things out for half the night bellies up to the bar. A woman who had stopped to let her dog pee, three teenaged girls walking arm in arm and an elderly man with a strained plastic shopping bag full of bananas all stopped and stared at me.

He was lost in the snow. I blinked to melt the snowflakes that had feathered my lashes and strained to see if maybe he had second thought and was heading back. He hadn’t and wasn’t. I shoved my hand into the pocket of my coat and felt around for my cell phone and thought for just a flash that I should call him, but the moment was gone, and now there were these people. These people here now with banana and dog errands.

Ummm.

“I never wanted you to change,” I shouted, suddenly, in the direction of his footprints. “Don’t you get it? I never wanted you to change!” this time I screamed it until I was breathless and rosy from all the attention. I made my dead snowflakes mix with perfectly queued artificial tears. I stared at the half moon just hanging there in the sky until I featured a fuzzy halo around it. Then I looked each one of them in the eye, all waiting for me to do something, but I just lightly shook my head, let a sigh push out of my nose and then started my walk in his footprints feeling the curtain pulling in.

Peter Jennings followed me to work one day. I had no idea he was trailing me until I was pushed with great force through the heavy revolving door of my office building and spit out on the other side where the security guard sat with a wide smile, only he wasn’t smiling at me. I looked behind me and there he stood in blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, his dry cleaning draped in plastic, flung over his back. Here before me was a man who’s forehead perspiration served as a natural styling product. He raked his fingers through his hair depositing his spring day sweat in even streaks and apologized for having pushed me so hard through the revolving door. He said something like this:

I don’t know my own strength.

And then he gave a laugh, nodded to the security guard and went on his way to the studio that was located on the ground floor of my office building. How does Peter Jennings not know his own strength, I thought, he wears khaki pocketed vests in combat zones and hurricanes and he stoicly reports the most devastating news to the entire world. This couldn’t be possible.

So just like one day you read a new word and someone tells you what it means, and the day after that you see the same word or hear it twice, and then the day after that you read it three times and have reason to say it once, and you wonder if this word had been a part of your life every day since the day you were born but for some reason you were blocking it or you weren’t ready for it’s true meaning, no matter how benign, I began running into Peter Jennings all the time. He became my new word.

I would take the bus from my apartment along Central Park West down to the ABC building and three quarters of the way down I would see Peter Jennings walking at the most sturdy and consistent pace, he looked as though the city was moving him along, like if he were to stop to tie his shoe or pick up a lucky penny he would still be moved forward at the same pace as if he had never stopped, Peter Jennings was meant to move forward as if on a conveyor belt. He always walked with his dry cleaning thrown over his shoulder and I took pleasure in knowing what he was going to wear that night in front of millions of people before most other’s knew.

I saw him in the halls of the ABC building, he gave a little talk about the Anthrax threat a few months after 9/11 to anyone who wanted to show up to the big conference room at penthouse level, and then the publishing company I worked for decided we would publish his book. This is when I saw him even more and learned that a hair really never was out of place and this was the natural way for him. He didn’t have make-up and hair people swirling around him, or assistants with number 2’s and clipboards puppy dogging behind him, he picked up his lunch in the cafeteria like most other people and when he had a meeting with his editor he showed up and was flawless. Some people are just flawless, graceful, they leave their egos somewhere else. They do their jobs and don’t know their own strength.

I remember when he was diagnosed with cancer and I didn’t even blink because Peter is on a foward moving conveyor belt and this is just him stopping to tie his shoe. Not only that, but celebrities almost never die. It’s like, Sheryl Crow now. Am I going to worry about her? Hell no, she’s got Lance Armstrong to get over and a baby boy to adopt, she is going to be just fine. I felt this way about Peter but I never saw him walking to work anymore and his visits to the office stopped completely. I heard that he had stopped by the news offices a few times but I never ran into him and I missed seeing this strong man. I missed watching the way the wind moved around him, almost apologizing for being in his space.

NPR said he died one morning and I laid in bed and the breath just pressed right out of me like steam from a hot iron on one of his clean white shirts. I couldn’t believe that any thing could be that strong, strong enough to kill Peter Jennings, someone so solid and clean-paced, I had been wrong about the conveyor belt, it was out of order. I was sad about it for months but never told anyone, ’cause who would ever understand not being able to get over the loss of an anchor man. But he wasn’t just an anchor man, he was like every man, every man walking to work, or getting his lunch or showing up to meetings on time, only he was doing it without knowing his own strength and that one little thing always makes me search for that kind of man, a man who could be my new word.

I have been restless for the past few weeks, falling asleep early but waking up at night in a sweat. The MTA is just getting worse is what my boss says and I tend to agree. We take the exact same route to and from work and sometimes run into each other. Yesterday two women broke out into a fight on my train car as I calmly sipped iced coffee and tried not to pass out from the misperscribed antibiotics I had started taking for a summer cold that has teeth and claws.

On the early subway rides, people nudge in closer and I look for ways in which space could be saved. Men should put their legs together when seated instead of V-ing them out to take up two seats, people bigger than one subway seat should stand unless pregnant, women should uncross their legs and sit upright, backpacks should slide off shoulders and plant firmly on ground or in lap, strollers bigger than a small SUV should be immediately booted off no questions asked, and anyone carrying an oriental room divider, cello or other large string instrument, road bike or area rug should try to find a yellow cab SUV outside, they’re everywhere.

I play this space game today while facing the young boyish suit in front of me who just might light himself on fire if the doors at the 72nd street stop open and close one more time. He doesn’t rage curse words under his breath like most people, rather, he fondles loose change between his fingers in his right pocket and whites the knuckes of his left hand as he hangs of the greasy metal pole. The pace of his breathing gets faster and he starts to shift from one foot to another with each open and close of the door. The coins in his pocket are like kernels in a hot pan now and we are all going to die, just from this simple open and closing in this stale heat, with doughy bodies pressing in. We could all die, but standing up, there is nowhere to fall in this tin can headed to a corporate office where temperatures remain blustery and arctic and the first thing I do is grab the cashmere wrap that hangs off the back of my desk chair and blanket myself like the crazy homeless lady on the corner of Broadway and Lafayette who thinks it’s still winter.

I’m sick and I can’t do dinner after work so I opt for a whole wheat bagel. The bagel shop by my apartment is just barely air conditioned and there are square fans in every corner. Madonna “Holiday” plays from some adult modern pop station and I wait for my bagel to toast while watching a long dust bunny fly round and round inside one of the square fans. We had square fans like these when I was growing up. My dad used to put a big one right between the open doors of mine and my brothers rooms when it got really hot. Sometimes before bed my twin brother and I would sing songs into the fan as loud as we could listening to our voices squiggle like alien babies. Lots of times I would just hum one note into the windmill, it was so soothing after a few seconds and sometimes I wished I could have more air to just keep it going, to have the strength to keep this hum.

I want to do this here, to sing “Holiday” into the fan at the top of my lungs while I wait for my bagel, or maybe just to hum something flat and static; the fan would make it wavy with branches and wires and I could be in the suburbs again where people have space and there are Moms who make Jello for colds and brothers who partner with you to discover crazy outlets that make you feel less crazy.

We drank pitchers of margaritas and shared plastic baskets of stale chips, and salsa that tasted like auto mechanics; the class, the men, the parts. Bad Mexican with a mix from my past normally would be cause for me to feel like a jumping bean, but in a way it was fine to see these people. It was just fine because Stanley Bobbit was there.

“Man, we’ve known each other for a long time,” is what the ex-editorial assistant said. The words kind of just slow-dripped out and he dreamily shook his head after the sentence was out there and hovering like a heavy gas.

I just nodded and sipped my drink instead of rolling my eyes with a force that would have stuck them in the back of my head for a good three hours.

I think I probably shared about ten hours in total with him when we were working together and since then we’ve met up in a big group for drinks twice. I don’t think 14 hours is long enough to get even a smidge sentimental, particularly when 10 of them have been spent in a corporate office. This is what I decided while jalepenos burned craters into the roof of my mouth and I badgered the waiter for more water.

After dinner we forged ahead to a dive on Hudson and even though I sat next to Stanley Bobbit, we both were holding converstations with other people, people we had, “known for a long time.” The two others got a little drunk and toward the end one of them got a lot drunk and he stumbled out of the bar while we filed out after him. We left our two ex-co-workers at the subway station so they could go down together and we could go up.

We sat across from a knot of teenagers, all arms and legs, acne-pocked faces with dodgy eyes and girls trying to make sense of what this hand hold really means.

“Look how young they are,” he said to me, “look at the blonde one there!” I looked over at a casualty of acne who was talking with his big doughy hands about a video game. He was the poster child for awkward teen years if ever there was one. I didn’t feel badly laughing about him at all, because this was the worst of it and things would start to clear up soon. We laughed quietly to ourselves to the point where the advertisements in front of me blurred and I wiped at my eyes. This is where I forget what else we talked about but remember how I felt.

I said to Stanley Bobbit, “I could have fun with you in a pile of shit.”

I’ve known him for a long time.

We hadn’t fucked things up badly enough for either of us to have to stay in it. So she wrote me an e-mail and that was the way it ended, maybe six months after a trip to Vermont where we had shared a cabin with her sister, Mother and grandmother. On the trip she told me that I was making her nervous and I didn’t know how to relax. They drank cokes and beers and huddled around jigsaw puzzles while I sat in the shade and tried to read, or sometimes just watched.

Over dinner her Mother declined the hamburgers but filled her plate with collard greens and grilled vegetables. “Ground beef makes my butthole itch,” she said. I thought about that one. I’m still thinking.

I spent more time in the water than anyone else on that trip. I swam across the lake to this little island while all of them watched for about three minutes and then headed back inside to move the jigsaw puzzle along. There I was, halfway across this open water, a lone red cap just bobbing. I remember thinking that I had misjudged my own level of fitness and perhaps I should turn around. But I’ve always been at my best in the water, always. Other people get tired and die in times like these, just a morning swim with no one watching.

I made it to the island, the seaweed creeping around my legs like candy cane stripes, the silt squishing out clouds beneath my feet, and the tiniest little minnow things nipping and bouncing off my own pulse. I straightened up with my hands on my hips looking at the cabin where I knew they were, three generations of my best friend, and all those beds upstairs with fleas.

I swam back with no one watching but when I got closer to the pier, her sister had waded in and was now using her hand as a visor. She squinted her eyes at me and said, “I can see why you love the water so much, you look so beautiful in it.”

“Oh, everyone does,” I said.

“No,” she replied flatly and then swam away.

I wonder if she ever asks about me or remembers the nervous girl who didn’t like jigsaw puzzles, but who liked to watch them all.

It happens on tweed sofas, or vinyl banquettes. It has happened on bar stools and at dinner over a white table cloth. A story will happen. Some other person there will tell it, but I will feel it. It’s the worst possible thing, in front of the people. Because then I will want to cry, but not just any cry, I will want to cry off this sting in my nose and eye corners. Like, cry til all that goes away, but I know if I start I may not be able to stop. So I don’t focus on the story that is happening, that other people are starting to contribute to, instead, I push it down and breathe deep. I tell myself that it must be the wine, that I must be in some strange part of my cycle, the part that makes women weep and want to stay in bed. I swallow wads and strings and nod like I’m still listening.

This story that has happened has triggered a thing, this pool I have that splashes up, always so unannounced; my embarassing family member who drags me away from the party long enough to remind me of who I am and how I almost always feel on the inside, and then spits me back to the party where the volume’s turned up and there are lipstick printed glasses and the laughter is pressing in and making me feel out of bounds.

I could have a good cry and get it done with. Kind of well up right there and let it all spill over. Use the corners of a cocktail napkin to seep up bowling ball tears and then do that laugh-cry-laugh thing where I fess and say that the story was just so sad and obviously I’ve had too much to drink or something. Whatever. But then they’d want to say kind things, or worse, move in to touch me.