jolie laide: June 2007

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

6.30.2007


This is my favorite one, because I look like I am being birthed by the train onto the Coney Island platform. That is perversely amusing. And it is proof, to those of you who know me largely as a cipher in cyberspace, that I really do exist in 3D.

6.29.2007

Taking dresses in to the drycleaners is always a slightly embarrassing affair. Draping the empty skins over my arm, parading them down the street deflated and charmless, their bright fluttering colors demanding attention their limp state doesn’t deserve.

The woman on the subway is applying makeup with extravagant precision, theatrically swiveling her hand mirror and her head to catch the light. She is doing something very delicate and elaborate to her eyebrows, and she’s right to concentrate on her small, even-featured face. A head shot of her would not show the arms as big as Hungarian baby bathtubs, the above-the-knee skirt shows the appending flesh on the inside of her knees vibrating with the trains movement.

I look at my own flesh, my own hand, grasping the overhead bar, the space between the tendons at my wrist. I’m a long way from being what I fear, those women fighting spreading middle age by over-gyming themselves into some ropy, joyless idea of fitness. I keep seeing this one actress around town, when she stands to perform she puts her hands on her Pilates flattened stomach, reveals her secret relish, smug. She is so satisfied it practically screams through her skin: I’m hotter now than when I was 25! But she’s not.

Out of the subway at midtown I walk the ass side of 34th Street, yawning caverns of shipping bays, scratching leaning legions of delivery guys as sentries. Some days I will shake my hair loose as I pass, to hear the whip crack, head turn, eye swivel, to give a wake up call to the listing somnambulists waiting for bills of lading. But not today. Today I am feeling the vulnerability of vanity.

6.28.2007

6.27.2007


For those of you who have bugged me about recent shenanigans. Taken of me, not by me.

6.26.2007

Yeah, yeah, I know. But if I am this quiet you know it is because I am thinking. Or running around Brooklyn dressed like a mermaid. Or filling in as my boss who is in Sweden for three weeks. Or getting ready for houseguests by doing odd totemic things like cleaning my windows.

6.22.2007

Half of her oversized bag has slopped off her lap and the handles are ticking me with every jerk of the train. He leans back and the mass of his shoulder is inches from the top of my head. This one loses control of her newspaper and it hits me in the face, oops, sorry. Another has drunk too much coffee, has a vicious case of the wiggle-foot that is translating through the subway bench.

That is to say, I'm not feeling very gracious as the sun slaps me at the top of the station's stairs. I'm on my way to a high school on the edge of the Bowery, to pick up a check for my agency. The school security guard has a tattoo on his forearm of Pooh with a honey pot, the words "Somethin Somethin" turning sweetness into lasciviousness. The stairwell smells like tater tots, and it's only 10.30AM. I am directed to room after room, turned around, unfamiliar, frustration rising in the dead air on the fourth floor walk-up.

I pick up the check and I think I can get my soured self out of there. But one of the teachers wants to meet me. She tells me the check is the proceeds from a penny harvest, the students voted on who to give the money to, and at the classroom door they call forward one of the council leaders. He cants his head towards his teacher, says something in dialect.

Jesus christ, he's fresh off the boat, unfamiliar with the words of my thanks, too humble, too unsure, to look the American woman in the eye. He clasps my hand and my heart is dropping through the floor with the sudden flash of what it means for him to be here. The grace of his gift is an acid burn for my ingratitude. A visceral stabbing need for penance makes me want to press my forehead to something but instead I am bade smiling goodbye, and now I am down the stairwell, out the door, onto the street, and eaten through with invisible shame.

6.19.2007

For months I watched the dog-faced lesbian at my station. Her hair was always wet and roughly pushed back, showcasing her heavy cheeks, the jowling of a hound. She was always alone, and I wondered who loved her, shambling wide onto the train. One morning she is riding with a woman wearing scrubs, and now I know, she has love, but it is on an opposing shift. Today I have just missed a train and I sit next to her to wait. She is reading a manual on structural engineering, an architect’s primer, so now I know her profession, or at least what interests her.

This time, every month, I have to be careful. The world inside my body does its shift change and tries to insist that my emotional life go along with it. It wants to pull everything apart, look for seams, lick nuances to see what they taste like, mate words and actions, discard mismatches, draw pictures of alligators and set them to bouts of crinkly paper wrestling. I am restless and impatient, looking for some kind of truth that may be found in ideas, but more likely found only in how they play out in the brickyard of building a life.

Up early, I am cleaning out my handbag. I have carried a scrap of paper around for months. It has a phone number on it, a 646 prefix of the newly wireless, the reluctant adopter of new technology. I can understand why, for the name on this folded dusty shred I found on the sidewalk says “Justice.” I like the idea that justice has finally gotten around to being accessible, is only a phone call away. I wonder how many messages have been left for justice, how long it takes justice to get back to you. Less literally, and more realistically, I wonder about the parents who named their child for this mighty, elusive, cauterizing blade of an idea, what their hopes were, how they thought this child should bring love into the world.

6.18.2007

I'm not red-eyed so much as greyed-out. Everything is muzzy and moving slow, this open air platform on a brackish bog near the airport, rising cricket song, damp air, there should be frequent trains at 10AM but there are none.

I am back in New York. Here, when I go to the movies it is in an old cinema palace, a renovated opera house, a retro-fitted industrial building. Here, when I go to a restaurant it is in an old grocery store, a former pharmacy, an outdoor patio that used to be the service apron of an auto mechanic. Buildings are recycled, re-purposed, and their old lives leave a patina, breathe in layers, sometimes too noisy, sometimes too overwhelming, sometimes too decrepit, sometimes too sad, but the presence of thousands of footfalls, of history, of use, is inescapable.

There, I cannot tell what has come before. What lays under the concrete is a mystery. This is now a black field of asphalt, cars nosing as sheep, grazing and aimless. It's a new shopping center, a bleak clean mall, a cluster of stores washed up on the banks of a lake of parking spots. I go for a run, until I run out of sidewalk. That's no great achievement, it doesn't take long. Pickup trucks slow, there is stare, honk and yell, this is not what people around here do, even though blooming by the roadside is lavender, jasmine, mulberries, anise, and a rough crop of hills I would like to be running alongside of, if only they would let me.

The train is finally here, sighing as it pulls through, exhaling itself open, and now I am back, because this is where there is a place for me, where I can pull a building around my shoulders as a comfort, where the street drama means noise and life and struggle, where I understand the lines on people's faces.

6.15.2007

He is blinking and bleary, he looks like he woke up 10 minutes ago. I wonder what that looked like, bed-headed, a thin sheet twisted around an ankle, a pillow come undressed in the night and showing its blue-ticked skin. I wonder what woke him, a blinking alarm, a cat's paw, a girl. He yawns, I look away to keep from staring.

It must be the day for sleepy men, for at another station the man next to me has just tumbled out of bed too. His face is turned away from me and his hair is uncombed, dirty, massing at the back of his head. I lean away, look down. Someone has written on the bench "let magic in." I appreciate the advice.

6.14.2007

I like it when the subway bench talks to me.

6.13.2007

In winter I will buy a new pair of shoes. And proceed to wear them every day, until they expire in the spring, when I will buy another pair of shoes. This biannual ritual has been the path for years, borne out of the necessity of poverty when one pair had to go with everything. I'm not poor anymore but still it's spring and I have not renewed my shoes. On the platform today I notice the heels are worn through. It's a little embarrassing, but won't be remedied any time soon.

A thirteen year old boy is doing his g-thang on a 2-seater subway bench, his knees spread wide, the crotch of his pants a sail in between. I say excuse me and he wordlessly shifts over to make just enough room for me. I say thank you because I want him to know his courtesy is appreciated. He folds his hands into his lap, once raising a finger to his mouth to delicately bite off a hang nail. His cheeks are smooth, his clothes are clean, he is fronting hard to hide that sweetness, and that has a charm to it.

The train at the connection downtown is slowed again, and in the aggregation there are people I recognize from other trips, people I work with. I know who is going my direction when we exit our station. I am going in the direction of the day lilies that are just starting to shout their orange blare, the long-necked pansies craning over the dusty hostas, that one, slow-growing climbing hydrangea with its long panicles still a set of tightly furled tease. It looks like it will rain again today and if it does I will not get to go running, but that means I will get more time for dreaming.

6.12.2007

Someone on this train is off-gassing last night’s gin. I can smell the used spike of it coming from the bottom of someone’s lungs, the last acid swipe vaporizing out of pores. The guy behind me seems a little unsteady on his feet, I wonder if it is coming from him. I turn my head to look. He has close cropped ginger colored curls and that’s something I could learn to like, if he could learn to stop p/a-ing me for more space by nudging me with his shoulder bag.

She is not blond, the adjective, but blond, the verb. Blonded, vari-colored, a Brighton Beach Holly Golightly, substitute Odessa for Oklahoma. Her eyes are at half mast, heavily kohled to hide last night. She working on the last of her brief shelf life, and the pink tank top, pink hair clip, pastel beads draped over the aggressively engineered forward thrust of her small breasts are both a vigorous flag of availability and a thin veneer of femininity to hide the calculations under the skin.

It has been days since I have seen something innocent or surprising or well-worn, or best, all three together, and I am starting to feel a bit desperate. Look up, and the blue sky frames an empty flag pole, the cheap utilitarian 1970’s style lampposts, what was once a proud grand opening banner now just half eaten flapping triangles of colored plastic. Even the roses in the park are done, gone tired and soft, wilting and wrinkling without even the energy to fall to the ground. I pass a trick bike chained to the fence. On one of the stunt pegs, written in White-Out, is the single word: holla. That will have to do for now.

6.11.2007

There's a storm pushing in, the sky is greying out, I better leave now or risk getting stuck here. I'm not ready to go, the Three Stooges Construction Company has been distracting me all day, their work on the building next door even with my office window. They are building up the second story, welding without goggles, a level does not make an appearance until afternoon. Sometimes when I look over they wave at me, so I purposefully concentrate elsewhere as they toss bricks up to the new balcony.

I took a painful lesson in flight last week, or perhaps just how much force I have in my legs, as I rush to cross Lexington Avenue. I tripped over a suitcase, knocked myself out of my own shoes, hit the ground knee first and now I am on my way to the subway out of stride and awkward. Barking Man is looking a little agitated in his seat outside the garbage shack. I can tell we will not be speaking today. His eyes are flickering, his mouth is worried. There is a can in a brown paper wrapper wedged between his legs, his hands flitting over the lip like skittering spiders.

I could go get a new swimsuit, or take my pocket change to the bank, or look for fishing line at the hardware store. But no, what I really want to do is head back to my nest, curl up in a corner with a view of the sky, and watch the rain come in.

6.09.2007

6.08.2007

The express train is streaming fast, a mercury bubble containing a thousand souls. Everyone is blurred together, indistinct and screaming off into the tunnel. When the local arrives it’s a tumbling parade of coffee cups, briefcases, baseball hats, newspapers, a guy with a wadded up tissue stuck up one nostril.

The man standing in front of me could pass for a paunching soccer dad with his cargo shorts and Rockport sandals. Except for the tattoos on his neck. On one side a red cratered crescent moon ridden by some female stereotype, on the other, a crowned skull and bongo drum ensemble. The knuckles on his right hand spell V I S E and wonder if he didn’t mean “vice” or maybe, given the prosperous spread of his belly, “Visa.”

It’s finally been glorious spring, cool air, bright sun. I smile at the old man sweeping in front of the bodega, not a little upturn, but the full bore, all the way back to the molars transformation. It’s the smile that made Brad Hunt tell me I looked like a mule, back in middle school. I figured that meant he liked me, and I tested the theory at 8th grade graduation, daring him out underneath the trees after sunset for my first kiss.

6.07.2007

This is a place for the still hopeful and this a place for the hopeless. Burnt husks of human beings and hell-spitting vibrant souls.

There is little extra here. Rooms are identified by stenciled spray paint on gray metal doors. Numbers would get prised off, nameplates would have to be maintained against casual but intentional disfigurement. It's just not practical.

The long hallways are clean and yawning, like the security guards waiting to take thier hourly pacing, ears cocked in between for the unseemly or flat out dangerous. If you are not in by 10PM the City rules allow for a more desperate woman to sleep in your bed for that night, especially during cold snaps brutal enough to force the most intransigent indoors.

The nicest, newest thing in this whole place is the metal detector, tucked in the corner after the mandated morning exodus. It's shiny bulk says impressive, expensive, and cheaper than the City really giving a sh!t.

There is a day room for women with nowhere to go, it is filled with TV and inertia, I think that is Rachel Ray, her face shockingly big and stupid on the large screen. I am trying to keep my own face blank, but a social worker touches my arm, says, "You're really thinking, aren't you?" Yeah, yes, I am.

6.06.2007

Today was a day to grin nearly to split my face in two. At the old guy on the corner who good-mornings me, he's made it through another season and celebrates by sweeping in front of the bodega across from the park. At the fat guy coming up from the pj's, oversizing a shiny chrome bike with his equally wide buddy riding on the handle bars, wobbling down Montgomery and squinting into the sun. At the roses blooming furiously feminine and littering the lawn with spent efforts, signaling high spring, yes, here.

6.05.2007

6.04.2007

His face seems to sink in on itself in the middle, his mouth an ungenerous harsh clinging to the edge of the precipice. He is wearing trendy glasses, reading Jonathan Franzen. I don't think I could love him.

I don't know how long he has been riding this train, but at this station, with its load, this car is full now. He is leaning against the pole with his entire back, not moving for the on-flood. I get my hand hold behind his neck, the only place his body is not.

A young family boards. Even though he has the privilege of wearing his father's oversized hat, the toddler is wailing those enormous heart break tears that anybody knows will be dried and forgotten in two stops. The man finally moves off the pole, giving the family purchase. I'd like to think it's kindness, but he probably just wants to get away from the noise.

The tropical storm is pulling through today, slowly, and everyone is wet, dirt-flecked shoes, rain-spotted shoulders. People manhandle the water off their umbrellas, the flapping folds like the flying ears of a wet dog shake. I'll get wet again on the walk to work from the station, and that's a welcome thing.

6.03.2007

My best friend in kindergarten was a little boy whose name I don't remember. At snack time we got cookies, the kind shaped like a flower, with a hole in the center. We would put them on our fingers, bite off the petals, and pretend they were wedding rings.