Brenda and the F Word

 Forget corn. I just realized… Men sell their seeds now, don’t they? And they cost a freakin fortune. Women sell their eggs and room in their wombs, too. In fact, I read in a novel that instead of selling blood to make money like in the old days, college girls make money selling their eggs to fertility clinics. For between 6 and 8 thousand a shot. Weird. Too weird.

Back to my redheaded friend in Madmen. Ok. So she isn’t a redhead. And any resemblance my friend might have to the secretary would probably bite the dust the moment she started discussing trench warfare in World War I, not to mention the introduction of military technologies and how cultures adjust notions of heroism,  bravery, and masculinity to accommodate new ways of fighting. Which is her thesis subject. Mighty big stuff, it seems to me, for a kid of the new century. Or how bout her scientest friend who is out there patenting life forms. Yes, life forms. The fear being that with all this sophisticated cloning going on, some corporation will cross an ape with a man (I thought they’d already done that. HAHA!) and create a slave race. The guy must have one hell of an imagination. I mean, I remember a guy buying domain names back in the paleolithic era. And that seemed insane. There must be an infinite number of potential life forms. (In fact, mice and pigs are already patented.)

Anyway, this is why I love drinking martinis in her company. Because it leads to so many wild, uncharted places. When I got home that night, for instance, I was thinking of genetically modified corn. I read this book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman a while ago. The writer/real hit man spoke about this particular kind of corn. Apparently, it can grow anywhere. Which sounds pretty cool, right.  Like you could throw it in the middle of a fucking airport runway and ears would pop up six months later. But it isn’t cool. It sucks. Because the corn has no seeds. Which means farmers in developing countries who buy it are automatically required to purchase the next season’s crop seeds from the greedy beasts who run the world’s agri business firms. Same goes for cows. According to The Center For Rural Affairs, farmers might be forced to pay a fee for every calf produced with a patented gene. No. No. No. Say it ain’t so.

So how in God’s name did I get onto the subject of cows and corn? All I’m really thinking about is Madoff. Talk about out with a whimper and whine. If only the guy were younger….In any case, I wish him a long, very long and healthy life!!! Long enough to make a major dent in that 150 year sentence.

Hallalujah! Saraghina is now officially open. Which is why we caravaned back out to the corner of Halsey and Lewis on Friday night. Everyone but me with eyes in their lap, following Google maps on  iPhones while I gazed out the window at a glorious end, or beginning, of the world sky. A flash of silver as shiny as fish scales one minute, all molten gold and rubies, the next. Windows wide open, the blast of Thriller and Billie Jean, everywhere. So loud, I swear it was shaking the axles. Between grins at moonwalking grown-ups on the streets, the sound of boomboxes, and backseat shouts of “Turn right on Broadway” or “Left at Washington,” I couldn’t help but smile.

I was thanking God for this exact moment and for Irishmen like Colum McCann, the author of a brilliant new novel, Let the Great World Spin. It opens with that stupifyingly daring skywalk on August 7, 1974 when Philippe Petit became one with the air, skipping, hopping, even lying down on a wire stretched between the two edges of the then unfinished Twin Towers. 

“What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn’t even there…It felt like some kind of floating. He could have been in the meadow. He felt for the curve of the cable with the arch and then the sole of his foot, a second step and a third. He went out beyond the guy lines…All of him in synch…Within seconds, he was pureness moving, and could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past…He felt, for a moment, uncreated. Another kind of awake.” 

Well, this was the kind of evening when the whole city and me also seemed to be in synch. Alert to “another kind of awake.” When we strolled through the door, there was Edo, the Frank Sinatra of pizza, in his swinger’s hat, manning the oven. And laughing. “Third baby on the way,” he said. “At home. The first was a water baby. The second was born on the carpet. But this one,” he added, palms open with a great Italian shrug. “Who knows?” I saw more beautiful people her in this place than at the Models and Muses show at the Met. All easy smiles. Most bright with youth, buzzed, balancing babies on knees and glasses in hands. While Kiko, the ever ebullient host, bounced from table to table, I talked a mile a minute, devouring fresh fennel salad, bruschetta, bufalo mozzarella pizza, and home-made pasta.

The audacity of it… What these men have managed to do. To bring this dream, this part of themselves, intact, so such a foreign place and find themselves welcomed with open arms. It’s magic. Later, I took a walk through Kiko’s garden down the block. There were fat, green grape leaves hanging from trellises, fig trees, and tall, overgrown grass. “It’s joyous, this chaos,” I said. 
“That is the greatest compliment you could give me,” he beamed as I cast a lustful eye at the home-made pies, covered in tinfoil, on his kitchen table. “For tomorrow night’s dessert,” he said, leading me back to the street. 

We’re all tightrope walkers, I thought, when the night came to its reluctant, happy end. Living on nerves. Strutting, hobbling, running across high tension wires. Stretched between edges. Up and elated one day, flung into free fall despair, the next. Waiting, wishing for both balance and disequilibrium. And then on the drive home, I thought of the book again. Of those 27 eternal minutes dancing over the abyss. When Petit, finally, raced into the embrace of a New York cop, the cop just grinned in absolute wonder. “Mother fucker,” he said, holding, hugging him, while snapping on the cuffs. “Mother fucker!” 

As writer, McCann confirms: 
“New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief… That made you say: Can you believe it? With an expletive. There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence…A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?” 

My youth just moonwalked out the door.

Among the many things discussed (like how to tell the difference between arrogance and confidence), my son spoke to me, yesterday, about the demise of newspapers. Which is a fairly sorry subject when you’re interning for the summer at the legendary International Herald Tribune in Paris. I love his talk of ledes, his use of the lingo: manning the rim, the slot, the backfield.
“But it’s over, Mom,” he said. “There are journalists here who know they’re going to lose their jobs.I can sense the sadness.”
Look at the bright side, I wanted to say. (Me who always looks at the dark side.) Think of the environment,  the millions of trees, that will be saved when newspapers, hell, even real books, become extinct. 
I didn’t say that. I didn’t think of it till now. “For as long as there are stories,” I offered, feebly, instead.”The world will need people to tell them.”
“Even on-line,” I added, hopefully.
“Yeah,” he said. “But on-line, there won’t be deadlines, Mom. You’ll never be able to put a story to bed.” 
“Which makes it a perfect job for you,” I started to say but didn’t. “Because you never sleep. You’re a night thinker. An insomniac.” 
“I just can’t SEE myself anywhere. I graduate in a year and I have no idea where I’ll be…”
“You’ll figure it out, ” I said, stupidly. “I promise.”

When I hung up, I felt as if I’d failed him. Mothers are supposed to be reassuring. They’re supposed to have answers. Then I remembered my husband’s comment a week ago.
“I don’t know where I am, Brenda,” he said, forlornly.
“None of us do,” I  replied. 

Because “we live in lonely, lunatic times.” (Edna O’Brien) Times when nothing is what it was but has yet to become what it will be. Professions like journalism, music, publishing,  advertising. All of it is in throes of some schizoid metamorphosis. And it’s not like other such times in history. Times when the invention of trains and cars and planes and telephones revolutionized the world. This is something much more amorphous. Fluid. You can’t feel it or touch it. Like a train, a car, or plane. But there’s no doubt that it ( whatever that “it” might be) will transform the way we live, work, and communicate.

I don’t envy Jack or others of his generation, living right smack in the middle of the question mark. But then I thought of all it, again, later. After dinner with an incredibly lively and curious 32 year-old woman. A woman who reminds me of that fabulous secretary in Madmen. The redhead. Like my son (and my daughter, too), there is nothing lazy–at least not in terms of how she lunges/flings herself at and into life. Which makes her a total pleasure to listen to. Always. This desire, this longing, to be listened to…Ultimately, this is what all of those professions I listed above (journalism, music, publishing, even advertising) are about. Every human being’s desire to be listened to. And that will never change.

At the end of  dinner, she laughed out loud: ”Geology, Brenda.  I hear there’s tons of work out there for geologists. Maybe Jack could switch from medieval history.” 
It was like that line in The Graduate when the middle-aged man pulls Dustin Hoffman aside before his leap into the swimming pool. “Plastics, ” he says. ”Plastics, son…” 

My friend, Sam, took me to task for calling him ” a struggling poet.” 
“But I figure that’s what I am,” he says. “Which raises the worrisome question…Is there any such thing as a “non struggling poet” ? Further and alas, I don’t think anyone ever refers to someone as a “wildly successful poet.” Also makes me wonder, does one say “struggling lawyer” or “struggling hedge fund manager.” 
 
Abject apologies, Sam. For the use of such a hackneyed, empty phrase. All poets struggle, whether they are wildly successful or not. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any poetry. Period.  

 My husband, R., also took me to task. For calling our relationship “stable and conventional.” He’s right, of course. I made us sound like some geriatric couple, killing time in a rest home. (Rest home. Has anyone ever considered just how grotesquely sad that phrase is?) Anyway, R and I are rarely at rest. Our love was launched the night we left the Gare de L’Est on board the Orient Express. While I slept, R stayed up till dawn, shooting pictures of moonlit villages as we sped towards stops at the baths in Budapest, the snowy mountains of Romania, the dusty, marbled hammans of Sofia, and ten days, climbing the claustrophobically narrow, ancient streets of Constantinople.(a/k/a Istanbul) 

These were still the times of rigidly guarded borders: German shepherds straining at their leashes, the far from benign beam of flashlights, a knock on the door, and the echo of hammering as sinister men in shades of grey and olive green searched for hollow, hidden spaces beneath our train carriage. This aura of danger, entering a great, potentially hazardous unknown, only added to the romance. Because there is nothing in life that pulls a couple closer than sensing some sort of threat, some danger, from the outside. Sometimes, I believe that this is the glue that continues to hold us together. This aura of danger. Plus the prospect or the promise of exploring the hollow, hidden spaces that remain within each of us.

After Istanbul, we were blissfully stranded for two weeks on the Turkish side of Cyprus, waiting to hitch a ride on a freighter full of chick peas. We sailed on a rainy evening from Famagusta for the port of Ashdot where I woke with the muzzle of machine guns pointed at my face and the relentless, rat-tat-tat of questions from Israeli soldiers. Collapsing in a flea bitten hotel on the beach in Tel Aviv, a friend raced to the rescue and brought us to her medieval house in the Old City of Jerusalem. There,  I ate my breakfasts at dawn, overlooking the Wailing Wall and Dome of the Rock. This was the first of too many journeys to count with R. A man who even mapless in the pitch dark labyrinth of Venice never fails to find us a way home.     

” Me? I always take no for an answer.”

Steve Toltz-A Fraction of the Whole. A very, very funny book.

And is this the shortest fucking post, ever? Yes, it is.

Spoke to my friend, Sam, this morning. (A struggling poet and writer of marvelous children’s books.) He described his weekend “joy riding.” Careening around a deserted beach down South in a Jeep with no roof, no doors, no seat belts. His wistfulness, his yearning, for those long gone years of reckless youth, reminded me of another form of joy riding. 

Love. I’ve been thinking of love a lot lately. Maybe it was my week in bed last week. (It was illness, alas! not passion, that put me there.) Or maybe it was reading the Almighty Wolcott and his rave about A Vindication of Love, which was reviewed in this Sunday’s New York Times. Back there in bed, I remembered all the “unhealthy” relationships I had in my own youth. Long distance love affairs that friends  often said were driven by fear; by a need to evade and avoid  real feelings. All of them with foreigners, far, far away from my mother tongue and native land. A shrink would probably have also suggested that this pattern of loving and leaving, of never unpacking, had something to do with repeating a childhood loss or a terror of abandonment. And back then, I might have agreed. 

At the moment, I’m not quite so sure. Because it was the almost unbearable intensity, “the ferocity of feeling” that I recall so clearly now. The exquisite poignancy of waiting (does anyone remember, waiting?)and the expectation… Jet propelled across the ocean towards the unearthly beauty, the embrace of Paris, training across all  of Siberia and Russia for a rendez vous in the cold, stone city of Stockholm, clutching the rails of a ferry on the English Channel with that taste of salt in the wind and the white cliffs of Dover ahead. Always enroute to the romance of other lands, other lives…

These were the years of my own joyriding. Of living with total abandon. No seatbelts. No helmets. No thoughts of an anxious future. As a woman who currently struggles with “control issues” (a polite euphemism for control freak); this notion of living with total abandon; of surrendering to “world-size emotions” (Osip Mandelstam) haunts me. 

But I can’t help but wonder…If I hadn’t experienced these other anarchic affairs, these extremities of despair, loneliness, and euphoria; of exaggerated emotions that defied even the need for language, for words, would I have been open to the somewhat (and I stress, somewhat) more stable, conventional love that came later? I say stable and conventional only in the sense that this love I now share with R acts as an anchor. An anchor that permits me to drift, but only so far. (That’s when it’s not dragging, of course.)
Would I have discovered that another human being can become, at least, for a time,  as mysterious and immense as the world itself? Joseph Brodsky may claim that “It is a small world and no man or woman makes it larger.”  Thankfully, I would have to disagree. 

Overheard at local coffee shop, yesterday afternoon.

Guy#1: Hey, man. You butt-phoned me at 2 o’clock in the fuckin’ morning…
Guy#2: (Chuckling): Yeah, well. You’re not the only one. My mom got a couple of calls, too. 

Butt-phoned. Love it. People butt-phone me all the time. I sit there at my deck, clutching the receiver, head and ear cocked like a bird, trying to decipher the distant chatter. Distant, of course, because the phone is so far from the speaker’s mouth. Like in a back pocket. Near their ass, covered with fabric. I always wonder if other people can hear me shouting. “HELLO! HELLO! HANG UP THE GOD DAMN PHONE! I mean, what a bizarre thought. Hearing this little voice screaming out of some guy’s you know what. Like the talking wart in that hilarious movie, How to Get Ahead In Advertising. 

Anyway, I am now an embedding freak. A young friend named Marshall (I call him the man/angel who fell to earth) dropped over for a tiny tutorial and taught me everything I need to know. So now you can actually click and go somewhere else. (Which is something I wouldn’t mind doing, right now. Clicking and going somewhere else.) Here, a little showing off of my new found skill… If you liked my week about Russia, this link will take you straight to the heart of Moscow where a young man writes like a modern Chekhov about life in the old U.S.S.R.
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Talley’s tent was billowing through the revolving door like the black sail on Theseus’s ship.( He was enroute back to Athens, remember? That’s Theseus not Andre T. He forgot to replace the black flag with a white one, thereby signalling his death/defeat. And his father flung himself into the sea.) Nothing quite so tragic occured at FIT where I attended the opening of the Isabel and Ruben Toledo retrospective on Tuesday night. Not unless you count Talley’s beleaguered attempts to hold down his wind-whipped tent while trying to escape through the door. Everybody who’s anybody was there. I know this for a fact because I spent the evening muttering: Oh My God! There’s what’s his name. Or: Wow! It’s that actress. C’mon, you know who I mean. She was in that movie. Hell, what was the name of that movie? 

I did see a man I remembered from the far off days of Studio 54. I recognized his ass. It was mostly bare, just like back then. And I saw Isabel and Ruben who remind me of a pair of 1940’s Cuban matinee idols. High school sweethearts and still irresistibly romantic and authentic. I saw the sea green dress Michelle Obama wore at the inauguration and a hand-painted silk floral sheath that looked so fresh, I wanted to pick it right off the mannequin. I saw an old lady wearing a hot pink hat the size of a fucking stop sign who nearly toppled over when she leaned down to scrutinize the details on a hand knitted pubic bikini. (Yes, a pubic bikini.) I saw Byron Lars, Matthew Modine, and Bill Cunningham, clicking away with his trusty old Nikon. I even shook hands with “Pinch” Sultzburger. (He was accompanied by a far from grey lady.) I did not see Patti Smith. When I left, I was holding a business card given to me by this fabulous black man who stood off on his own in a corner. Wearing pounds of heavy gold chains, a ripped black satin shirt and pants, he had a tiny Chinese topknot perched on an otherwise bald head. I have no doubt you’ll see his photo in this Sunday’s NYT Styles section. 

A party animal, that’s me.