Friends 2

I’m going to write about Rafael Nadal winning Wimbledon another evening during this brutally hot week.  For now, there are other things I need to address, but there is something elemental about his struggles and achievement in all of this – at least I suppose so.

As someone who has spent the majority of his youth trying to understand the  impossibility of friendship rather than comprehend the fathoms of love, I again found myself, the day after the Fourth of July, staring into the azure blue of the deep end of my childhood pool and cleaning dirt and mulch from the shimmering bottom.  This isn’t to say that I never enjoyed cleaning my pool – in fact I always have loved it in some strange way.  I’ve loved it because you can stand outside in the heat, away from your neighbors and listen to the radio in private.  You can become the shrieking heretic in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the snide hipster of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then when you’re done, you can jump in the pool, submerge the heat and the sounds of the radio, only to emerge once more, pleasantly surprised by the heat of the air and the slick feeling of your hair as you push it or flick it back on your head.  Then, if you choose to, you can get out and touch the soles of your feet to the bricks that your parents paid for to surround the pool.  Or, if you choose to, you can simply float.

Jay Gatsby was shot in a pool, but I was never anything like him, though I did think I could’ve made an admirable Nick Carraway.  What I always admired about the whole mess that led to Gatsby’s demise, besides the idea of creating an image of yourself and building an identity in America, was the illusive notion of friendship that Nick Carraway seemed to identify with the Gatsby.  This idea was recently resuscitated with an almost equal level of eloquence by Joseph O’Neill in his novel Netherland.  These are both novels about men who are lost and who are able to find out truths about themselves by making acquaintances with two different criminals.  Gatsby is by all means a high level bootlegger and gambler as we are led to believe, while Chuck Ramkissoon runs an intricate but low-level Caribbean “lottery” throughout New York City. These narrators, Nick Carraway and Hans, are both looking to make an identity for themselves in New York, and have lost touch or have chosen to the lose touch with the places they came from. For Nick, that is the Midwest, for Hans it is London and his native Netherlands. Hans actually has a wife that he is estranged from, where Nick Carraway looks for love with the distant, independent, and modern female tennis player (see, I told you Nadal was in here!) Jordan Baker.  Because their love lives are unreliable, they look to notions of friendship they find in unreliable males.  Both Hans and Nick are able to find the sensations of masculinity in male friendship in both Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon: feeling privileged to be in the other’s company, the sense of adventure of moving about in the world with the other, the sense of sharing a similar desolation, the ability to drink a beer in the sun and share a private moment.  However, each one is left grasping at what their friendship meant or could have done after their “friend” has been murdered in each story.  Nick Carraway tells us in the beginning of The Great Gatsby that he wants no more “privileged glimpses into the hearts of other men.”  That, in essence, is what male friendship boils down to.

These similar tropes have been seen in the work of Jack Kerouac, whom I think in the 21st century should be madatory reading for elementary school boys instead of Treasure Island and that kind of book.  The Duluoz Legend of Keroauc’s mind’s eye represents the what should be the new “adventure book.”  Kids know about all the dirty things earlier now anyway, why should they not read about unbridled enthusiasm and driving across the country, climbing mountains, driving in cars, when they are young and are forced to be driven around by their parents.  No one wrote better about a fall day coming home from school and eating peanut butter crackers with milk than Kerouac anyway.  He was a maudlin and unapologetic nostaligist.  And, he often depicted the search for friendship in the cast of characters in one’s life better than most writers in any medium.  You may find him amateurish and by all means he certainly is, but even in the most amateur of technique, or brutish sensibilities, we can find the truths of the world.  The friendship between Kerouac and Neal Cassidy as it was fictionalized or marginalized by Kerouac’s work is something that should be admired as the representation of a relationship between two people in this world, two friends, two men trying to make sense of the years and whims that rose up within them and without them.

So, because of novels like these, I spent much of my youth looking for that kernel of truth in friendship, in male friendship that would answer me some kind of question.  What does it truly mean to be a friend to someone?  How does one get by when those friends have to travel and move on to do the different things with their lives?  What happens when our adventures end? Do our adventures ever end? Is it even possible to love somebody else?  These are the questions that the illusive search for friendship can raise up in your mind.  And I spent much time cleaning my pool and thinking about these types of things.  I found myself doing the same thing the day after this past Fourth of July because I had a variety of friends staying at my home from different levels of life: elementary school, junior high and high school, college, and post college.  Some of them knew each other very well, some of them knew me very well, some didn’t and vice versa.  Yet, we all got along and had a memorable time.  The kind of time that sticks to your memory and leaves the details there, so, that even if you are one who loses tracks of the details to distinct places and “times” easily, you would be able to recall the year, the light and perhaps who was even there.  And of course, when it was all over, when the beer and other litter had been dragged to the curb, I was there cleaning the pool, thinking about all that had happened and all of the fun that had ended.  The radio played and the mercury in the temperature inched closer and closer to 100 degrees – ambition echoed hollow In my gut and I just wanted to be finished with it all and be able to swim.  I wanted to run out into the shade and the swaying of the trees and the heat.  After that, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen – I just wanted that.

Then, a song I had been longing to hear came on the radio.  It was “Mother” by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band.  I, thinking of friends, of course thought of The Beatles and about how stories end and how we move on as I have written about before.  If you have listened to Plastic Ono Band it is all about moving on and how we do it in the different areas and through the different traumas of our lives.  I grew up loving the album, because when I was younger, I related to John Lennon more than any of The Beatles just like most kids do.  You gravitate towards John Lennon because he was the “smart one.”  All the Beatles were funny, but he had the quickest and most biting wit.  He made the bold statements.  He was the leader.  You don’t think about the finer shades that you do the longer you spend with the Beatles: “Paul was the most melodic,” “Paul was the most natural musician,” “George’s songwriting was held back just look at All Things Must Pass,” “I agree with George’s pragmaticism and spirituality more than with anything harsh that John had to say, or simple that Paul had to say.” When you are young, you love John Lennon, because that is what time has taught us about the Beatles.

And I loved John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band because he said all the bold things, because he screamed in his John Lennon way and because he made hooks out of the syllables in his verses in that singular John Lennon/Beatles/mostly John Lennon way (just listen to “Mother” when he says “Sooo, ayyyyyeee”).  However, I loved it the most because no matter what I was going through, I could listen to it and feel clean again.  It was like getting a haircut for your soul.  That image seems demeaning, but the sentiment is true.  Whenever you go for a haircut, you go for that feeling of newness, of freshness. “With this haircut, I’m going to do something. I’m going to impress someone. Something’s gonna be different.”  Whenever I put on Plastic Ono Band that is the intent that I have. From the refrain of “Mother” when Lennon says “So, I/I just have to tell you/Goodbye, goodbye” to the thrilling coda when he screams “Momma don’t go/Daddy come home” you know that he is losing the demons and  whatever yours may be, you can lose them to with his screams and with the hypnotic piano and drums. Then we get to “I Found Out” where John tells whoever is listening that “I’ve seen the junkets/I’ve been through it all/I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul/Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/No one can harm you/Feel your own pain.” And of course he throws the double entendre in there with the loaded word “Paul,” making you think just a little bit harder about what he means because he is saying it with such conviction.  As the album veers from harsher commentary to the brooding slower numbers such as “Love,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Look At Me,” you get the ultimate sense of someone stripping themselves to the essentials.  There are no comments on what friendship is or what love is, besides to say that “Love is real/Real is love.”  This effect is refreshing since there is no overarching statement leading you in a direction.  Love is real, is merely an indicator of a feeling.  Because even John probably didn’t even know what it was that he was calling his love with Yoko Ono at that time.

Then, of course we get to “God,” which has always been one of my favorite songs of all time because it doesn’t let you get away with anything.  Now, many people may call this song merely self-important sermonizing, but I can’t stress how powerful I used to find this song and how necessary I still find it.  How often to you address a statement to God that could be addressed to the earth or to something more definite, when all you are doing is trying to measure out the amount of pain or confusion you are feeling?  How often to you place meaning on a false idol of any kind, God or anything else?  When John lists through the names of all the things he doesn’t believe in anymore, all the icons that he is tearing down, it is timeless in a careening way of never letting yourself get consumed in the things that you have consumed your time with.  It is an exercise in separation, in distance and in seeing something from a new perspective.  When punk music came around, they did the same thing, in a less eloquent and less conscious way.  They wanted to tear down icons because it looked cool, not because it trapped them.  This is all the stuff of James Joyce.  There should be no nets that trap you.  All our Elvis’, our Zimmermans, our Kennedys, and our Beatles need to be overthrown at every turn because they are wait rein is in to saying “we can’t.” Those images and icons, while showing us what is possible, also indicate to us that there is something that we can’t or shouldn’t do or that we aren’t capable of doing, but we are always more than capable.  So we have to get rid of what we’ve already known from time to time, we need to start over again to remember that there is only us in the end and that’s all that there ever was to begin with.  That is the haircut that allows us to see what we’ve been consumed with better than we’ve ever been able to see it before.  That allows us to understand what our love is; what the feelings of friendship we are longing to define are.

This was supposed to be a manual on cleaning pools, but now its about cleaning something else.  I guess what it’s all about is realizing that the Midwest of your youth never really existed, that no matter how many books you read, how many words you learn, you’ll never come upon that word known to all men, you’ll never truly understand how to describe the impossibility of friendship or the fathoms and blue shades of love.  All you can do is remember all of the things that brought you to a certain point and then try to forget them all, try to forget the way you saw them so that you can see them in the way that they really are.  Because in the end, its all about what you can accomplish and very often you can’t accomplish much without other people, but with them you can often lose yourself by forgetting what’s important or forgetting how you see them. So, you have to get a haircut from time to time – alter that identity and those identifications, if ever so slighlty, in order to keep chasing what you’ll never be able to fully capture.

Actually, this was a pitch for a new TV show called Friends 2.

Until Next Episode

In order to start this post, you have to picture me in a restaurant. I’ve just gotten off work early at 6:15 PM from a job that I don’t particularly enjoy very much, but which I happen to find myself good at. The mild air of the day has begun to turn and the frigid breeze of the night has left my face red as I step into the tight, gold warmth of the Little Italy restaurant. I unfurl the worn purple, grey and brown scarf that I wear, which was inherited from a grandfather I never met. As I look up, I see my mother and my sister sitting upstairs at a table with my aunt, my uncle, and their three children: boy, boy, girl – none older than eleven. Neil Young is ringing in my ears as I sit down and I feel especially strong, ragged and young, but also vulnerable, because I have to pretend that I’m not invincible to this people, because I’m actually not – I just feel that way when I’m hungry and remember that I’m young in a world full of strangers and tall buildings.

So, I sit down. Hugs and kisses are exchanged. The kids are cute, funny and well behaved as always. I eat bread with sundries tomatoes and oil. I ask my sister if she liked “500 Days of Summer.” I ask my one little cousin what book he’s reading. I ask my other little cousin why he doesn’t like samurai. Then, because the adults at the table have seen me grow from book to book and from not liking certain action figures, and because they love me, they ask me questions.

“When are you leaving the job, Matt?”

“At the end of the month.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not really sure. I think it will work out.

“What do you like?”

“I like to write”

“But what do you like?”

“I like basketball and music.”

“Well there you go.”

“I like writing about my generation. What they are doing. The choices they make and don’t make.”

“That’s what’s interesting about your generation. There isn’t any kind of defining voice.”

That last line is what my uncle said to me. It wasn’t a revelation to me, but it articulated, very simply some of the ideas that have been swirling around in my head recently as I have begun to think of these end of the decade sentiments, columns and lists that are being distributed and waxed upon. Now it is very true that all generations don’t have a defining voice or a theme to bind them together. It is very true that the idea of a “generational voice” or a “united generation” is just an object that is produced and presented to us as a commodity to help understand time better. All of this may be true, but that doesn’t stop us from asking, “Yeah, but what about me? What about my generation?”

I am not going to try to sum up this generation, nor am I going to try to sum up this decade, I am simply going to write about what I have seen and how it appears to me. What I have seen of late, is the summation of this past decade as one of superficiality: the Paris Hilton decade, The American Idol decade, the Kardashian Decade. However, for as many people as I have seen welcome high-paying jobs, platinum jeans, revolving door cell phones, I have seen just as many people reject the same allures. And why is that superficiality wrong? What is wrong with accepting objects in order to make you happy? What is wrong with being able to buy things for people in your life to make them happy? This comment is not meant to be facetious. This life and this world are made up of objects. The image of an investment banker is the same object as the image of an artist – both can be crated and bartered like anything else.

To harp on a subject of great interest to me, Mad Men has certainly given us insight into this trait I am talking about. In the first season of Mad Men, Don Draper shacks up with his artsy mistress who is living in Greenwich Village. Draper smokes weed with his mistress and her bohemian friends who scoff at him because of his slick and polished appearance. At the end of the episode, when the bohemians are nervous about approaching cops outside of the apartment building, it is a stoned Don Draper who is able to walk out to continue on his life with a simple, “You can’t go out there.” What does this mean? This means identity. Both the artist identity and the ad man identity are one in the same – they are both goods, disguises we put on. Draper is constantly battling what disguise he is going to wear and which one works for him. His office identity is the one that fits him best, as he says to Peggy in season three:

“There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.”

Is this quote not essentially true for this generation, this decade? “Something terrible” always happens to us in varying degrees and we can’t see ourselves. That the something terrible can be as disparate as anything in this world, but it is usually tied to time. So we try disguises, we try objects to try to find that thing that is real to us, that thing that we can take with us.

The novel Netherlands by Joseph O’Neill covered the same issues. The narrator of the novel has a successful finance job and his wife is a high-powered attorney. His wife becomes extremely affected by the 9/11 attacks and can’t feel safe living in New York, while the narrator, always feeling distant from his actual life (much like a Nick Caraway), doesn’t completely understand her distress. It takes their separation and his subsequent friendship with a Trinidadian gambler to understand that he has always been looking for something real that is his. From his fragmented childhood on, he has only been left of vague images and memories of who he is and where he came from. The narrator begins to understand that this is something that is wife values and that it is actually something that he values as well. His wife is concerned with what is hers, which is their child and living in an “unsafe” city. Once the narrator begins to understand how to connect to his own life, he can begin to understand what belongs to him and what he can take with him.

Even little Wall-E, as he rolled along the brown debris on the earth and found the inherent joy in the smallest objects, couldn’t take it with him. Just like all the humans who left the garbage couldn’t take that with them. It is through objects that we may gain access to “the incorruptible eon of the gods,” but that isn’t where that realm lays - that soundless, floating, reach of space of the soul.

Perhaps this struggle has caused such great music to be created in this past decade. There have been phenomenal new albums that have come out in the last ten years; some of my all-time favorite artists have come of age since 2000 and some of my all-time favorite albums have been released in the same space. Maybe it is the inevitability and the immediacy of communication and information. Maybe it is the fact that we can Google the answer to any question, even the questions that the great art spent answering, like “what is love?” We can now Google, “clinically, when am I supposed to fall in love?” We can even Google ourselves and people we don’t even know.

Now, I know I’m supposed to be funny – and I AM. And believe me, I love every second of my computer and the abilities I have to Google “when do I fall in love?” “How fat should I be if I am 5’10?” or “Animal Collective new album leak MPP blog .rar.” However, we have been shown this new decade of “superficiality.” We have been shown jobs in finance, accounting, but have been left wanting more. The past ten years have offered a fluid glimpse into the lives of the privileged, of what money offers. However, in the end, with the economy already failed, we have been given an even greater look at the invincibility of the American Dream. Perhaps that term is even too narrow. What we are truly talking about is “promise.” This decade as it comes to its close, to a book-ended and encapsulated commodity to be sold like the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s leaves us on the precipice looking at the promise of the next decade to come. It leaves us as someone who was once very dear to me said, “with infinite potential.” It leaves us with the ability to overtake the old institutions and I’d like to think that this has come and has been earned without the incessant marketing of our President as a good and the term change as a vegetable. I’d like to think the palpable opportunity of the next decade, and the indecision and searching of all the peers I look to, is because of the fact that institutions won’t satisfy us and will not dictate us. We will elect our presidents, we will respect and appreciate them, but they will not dictate our creativity or ambition – that is and should be left to us alone.

In the end, though, it’s back to the basketball, the music, and the beer. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I work hard at and am damn good at a job I don’t care about. That I love my family. That this world is strange and changeful and that I am going to have to fail in order to ever find something worth searching for, worth making real. That nothing feels like its mine and every evening I am left standing on the doorstep, hungry, invincible and with the wind whipping on my face. And maybe I’m not like a dog, maybe I’m just young and unappreciative, and maybe that’s all that it ever is. However, I’ve heard the chimes at midnight, just like the rest of you.

I’ll see you in 2010.


Editor's note: Ten Things I Hate About You really should have been number 9 on the Top 20 Movies to Watch on TV. It really is one of the top movies to watch on TV. The girl from Alex Mack plays the hot girl. A career defining performance by the late Heath Ledger. The only movie with both Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it - arguably two of the best young actors of the past decade- plus the one friend looks like my buddy Jeff (except my man Jeff is skinnier). You would watch this on TV. Come on.

Two Things on Tuesday

There are two things I want to address tonight:

1.

I've been on a new fiction kick lately. After months of rereading Anna Karenina and then delving into a Tolstoy biography, the past two weeks I have been catching up on some back logged Christmas gifts of new fiction (because really Christmas is the best time to ask for what is, for most consumers, an unknown commodity). The first week of March I wafted through Jim Harrison's "The English Major." I do not mean to use waft as a pejorative term, the book is very light and reads easily. However, it is a very good road story told from a perspective that has not been seen, by me at least, in a road novel. That perspective being an elderly man. What this narrator is looking for is not much different than any other protagonist in a road story, a new beginning, a better understanding of one's country and why one feels an attachment to it, and how all of the emotional entanglements, romances, and nostalgias of that individuals life are tied to their country - or their understanding of what they think America is. Good book.

The past week and a half I have been working on Joesph O'Neill's "Netherland." I am about three quarters through but have been compelled to comment on it from the first few pages. This is truly a fantastically written book. You will receive overwhelming waves of the Fitzgerald senisbility and mood when reading the novel - his sentences flow, digress and then resolve just as beautifully as Fitzgerald's do. There is also that almost unexplainably true sensation a reader gets when reading Fitzgerald as with O'Neill that a story is meant to be told in the wake of some significant moment that will only be revealed at the very end of the story. Now, this may seem elementary, but in the Great Gatsby, Nick has a terrific way of reeling the reader in and then letting the line slack as to why his tone and relation to the events that have occured to him are so profound and so heavily reliant on a retrospection that is intoxicating. So far, in O'Neill's story of a displaced Dutchman/Englishman in New York, the utilization of retrospection draws the reader in and places him in those shoes. O'Neill's protagonist may be estranged from his wife and child for reasons that he understands and at the same time struggles to see the truth in, but his tone and approach to the matter, with a vague sadness that points to the profound appeals and seems familiar to any reader. We all picture ourselves walking with our hands in slightly stale khaki pants, walking city streets in a mild cold in bewilderment. How did this all happen to us? And what are we going to do next?

2.

The Tony Castles. Now all three of these guys, Gabi Wurzel, Paul Sicilian, and Willie Miesmer are good friends of mine. Gabi plays in the Muggabears, Paul a former member of Bernie Tonka, and Willie a member of Boogie Boarder, but all three have come together to make a band that is really going to do something. I am biased of course. However, if you go to their Myspace page, linked above, and listen to "Black Girls in Dresses," you will agree it is the hit single that no one is listening to yet. Forget about noise pop with little girls singing in asian, this is the music for the young and the masses. You make sure to look out (you who do stumble on this) for any next show they have listed. Ask me and I can ask Gabi.

Now, for the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt:



James

The rain is falling outside and I don’t feel like doing anything. Dad’s leather study chair isn’t comfortable but it reclines back with my weight so I can trick my posture into being comfortable. It’s been a long time since I’ve sat and admired the rain. I was never melancholy enough to do it so often. I always got the sense that Tom was that way although he never really told me so or shared so much. I’d catch him reading poems and gazing out the window when I’d come home from school or on the holidays. I think he had an artistic bent to him. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. He had to recite that for English class. Mr. Marsh. I had to do that also. I forget what I picked. I think it was one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. There were so many of those to go around. I couldn’t really enjoy it. You don’t enjoy poetry or get caught up in a school assignment if you are on the lacrosse team. That would make you look like a fag. I always hated that word.

Drops are falling on bushes, the leaves are still full on trees and they move slightly in the wind. Things are green and wet and the light is still a summer light even though it is grey, it’s not dark and depressing like the rain or grey of November or December. How considerate of mom to die in a month when the weather is still nice and we don’t have to shovel snow to get to a grave. That’s what I’m looking at. The paperwork for the funeral. She and dad had enough morbid sense to make their payments already and plan everything out in advance. Who thinks of that? I guess we all have to think of that. We all have to set up our gardens to plant ourselves in, make our advance payments for it too so that everything is neat and clean trimmed mounds of dirt next to the green of the grass and maybe a flower or two. I spoke to Aunt Diane before.

“I ordered a flower arrangement.”

“Thank you but my mom had already picked out her arrangements.”

“A sister can add her own too. That’s the way it is at funerals.”

“I guess I never noticed before.”

“Best that you didn’t. What does a young man need to notice flowers at a funeral for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You had a good mother.”

“I know.”

“We could all use extra flowers.”

Everyone sounds so sad and seems so sad. We weren’t all this messed up all the time were we? I don’t think so. I had a happy childhood. I’d like to think that people were envious of our family. I was a good brother. Maybe I was too anxious to grow up. To handle paperwork and be a man, be relied upon by a wife like Eve. I could’ve been a better brother to Tom. I tried to teach him things, to stay away from losers, the guys I hung out with on the team. I wanted him to escape too. But what is he doing now? Why does he still live on the Island? Why does he come home? Why is he at mass now? I could’ve been a better brother.

The chair rocks back and forth and I hear it squeak underneath my weight. I grip the wood of the table with my right hand and shift the paperwork around with my left. Bryant and Sons Funeral Home. Old Town Road. The name is written in script with a slight flourish of graphic underneath it. Piles of paperwork make up this world; it’s the world that I work in. Numbers, files, papers. I don’t want Tom or Liza to be in a world like that, but I don’t know if you can escape it.

“You’ll be a good husband, James.”

“Do you think so, mom?”

“It doesn’t really matter if I think it.”

“Of course it does.”

“You had your father to look at.”

“But he had his problems didn’t he?”

“And so did I.”
“You did?”

“We’re all faulted.”

“That’s only the Bible talking.”

“Well, if you think that then we all have compromises to make. We face ourselves and sometimes we have to give things up. Luckily, your father was able to do that. He gives me too much credit. I might’ve been too much of a bitch when I was younger, but he seemed to understand something in it.”

“That all seems too nice. How can it all make sense like that?”

“I don’t know if it all does make sense like that.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll be a good husband, James.”

“Mom.”

Her red cheeks. The reddishness of her hair like Maggie. The youth that remained in her face, especially in the corners by her eyes so that they still looked twenty-four. Why couldn’t dad catch the illness?

The desk lamp makes the room look gold. My life and childhood have been something out of a movie. I spin the chair and as it slows, I face the window and the rain again. Life isn’t so sad. Life is made up of rainy days and I should learn to enjoy rainy days more. I should let water drip off the end of leaves and fall to the grass to enter into the rest of the earth. I can remember taking naps in October on cloudy days in college and listening to music. I’m still young. When did I become the leader? When did I become responsible?

Come in here, James. There’s a little boy who wants to meet you.

I’m a father?