too old for the scene

I knew I was getting too old for the scene when I complained of the entire show being an underage event. No 21+ balcony, no bar scene for the adults, no place to lounge and enjoy a beer while watching the music and the kids go crazy.

I used to be one of those kids. Sixteen, seventeen, twenty years old, and full of aggression. Full of rage, of anger, of passion for life, maybe just passion for youth and all the recklessness of ‘living for the now’ that goes with it. I used to sit through high school seething, insecure with raging hormones and raging emotions. Perhaps perceived, partially in truth, I was an outsider. I didn’t have great friends, and I didn’t really want them either. At the shows though, we were all the same. Our own group of outsider teens, each with our own energy, vibrating at the highest of frequencies, needing to connect. Needing, craving physical interaction, even if through violence, our needs were met. And the music was the backdrop, cliché as it sounds, the bands provided the soundtrack to the violence of our interaction.

But that was years ago. Now I wanted to enjoy my whiskey ginger and not worry about swinging elbows and falling down. And I definitely did not want to do this from the far side of the club where the bar was located, but truth be told, I just didn’t have the energy to fight my way to the front anymore.

The music was good, not great, as they played the songs I knew they would. But as the show went on, I started to get back into the old spirit, bobbing my head with the music, jumping a little in place. Excited, I could have been seventeen again for a minute. A friend gave me a shove, and it was on. I ran towards the front, just like the old days, knocking people out of the way, throwing elbows and furious glances in the direction of anyone who wouldn’t let me easily pass. And then I broke through, out of the crowded masses and into the violent chaos of the mosh pit in front of the stage.

I staggered for a moment in the sudden brightness, so close to the stage, the back lighting creating silhouettes of the band screaming only feet away.

I smiled.

And then it was madness, the perfect madness of fifty kids jumping and sweating together in time to the music. Very loud music, played very fast. Pushing and shoving, elbows flying, legs flailing, people falling all over each other, connecting in unison. And I was in the middle of it with a huge smile on my face, sweating on, and being sweat on, one of the pit’s elders, losing myself in time to the music as the show came to a furious close.

I was being pushed, spun around with the other kids as the strobe lights alternately lit us up and then pitched us into blackness with the final crescendo of heavy guitar wailing. It was one of those passionate moments, just to enjoy life in the crowd. Light and I was able to see the singer finishing his screams into the microphone, dark and nothing as I spun. Light and I could see the smiles of the shouting kids, applauding a passionate performance, dark and nothing again. Light and I was able to make out a face, a girl, spinning in the pit with me, her face rapidly approaching mine. Darkness and nothing.

And then she hit me.

All five feet and one hundred pounds strong, she head-butted me with a fierce determination found only in teenage punk rock girls. And it hurt. In the darkness, I thought back to the hundreds of shows I had been to in my 25 years alive, and the relative luck I’d experienced in never really getting hurt in the mosh pits. A couple bumps and bruises, I had always been fortunate to give out a lot more punishment than I had ever received. And now this, I was too old for this.

As the house lights came up, I was able to see my attacker being picked up off the floor by a group of her girlfriends, all dressed in their punky chick uniforms. Christ, she looked to be about 15 years old. Blood running down her face from a gash in her forehead, she appeared vaguely dazed, and then she saw me. She focused for a moment on unsteady feet and smiled. Amazing. I smiled back, the action further opening the cuts on both my split lips, the pain mixing with the adrenaline from the show creating a euphoric feeling as I walked toward the exit, my own face covered in blood.

I felt for my teeth, all still there, though some definitely knocked a little loose. I smiled to myself as I knew I was getting to be too old for mosh pits, but I knew I’d never be too old for the shows.

Spotlights at the Circus

Mists spread across the arena, braced by steel scaffolding and safety ropes. Catapulting through the haze: performers with blue sequined eyes and clothing vacuum-sealed against their bodies. Complex lighting arrangements hang like egg-sacs from the ceiling; big brained things that swivel and glare across the expanse. Beyond that, in the shadows: the four of us. We see action and, like spiders, trap and release it in our lights.

There are four of us attached to the umbilical contraption called a headset. We are each in our own corner, high up in the rafters of the domed circus canopy. Dressed in black and hidden by the darkness, we are each a featureless silhouette to one another and to the audience below. Gripping the hot metal cones of our spotlights, we are an awesome disconnect of the senses. We are a rush of signals through the radio. We are the optic lens of the spectator, widening and narrowing our irises to define action that we are not a part of.

While performers leap and glide across the stage, performing inhuman acts of skill and daring, we remain in the rafters, shadowing their movements with long strokes of our arms. We are attached to these athletes, to the strain of their muscles and the shading of their skins. We tense in wait to follow, tracking the tautness of each elastic tendon. They are cats preparing to pounce. We are their shadows.

We are in the action, but we are also outside of that action. We form a web of communication outside of it, like an external nervous system in sympathetic movement with the primary atoms. We are part of the complex network of machinery, among fabulous contraptions like the Russian Swing, the German Wheel, and the Shoot-Through Ladder. We cross-light during the Spanish Web and scissor acts with inexplicable names like Adagio and Pas de Deux.

We are in darkness, invisible, and detached from others. It is sensory deprivation, but it is also an overstimulation of the senses. There is an otherness present – a sense of being fully in tune with the movement of strangers. It’s like being a third species, with a peculiar awareness of what it is like to be more than one person. Like homunculi at the circus, our impressions are distorted and surreal. We have enlarged sensory organs, with afferent nerves wrapped around the four corners, swallowing the crowds inside of us.

ESL princess

It’s a horrible thing to wake up tired, to attempt to rationalize an extra three minutes of rest, and the first thoughts of the day to be along the lines of “how long until I can get some real sleep?” That was this morning, that is every morning of mine during tax season. That was eighteen hours ago, I’ve finally made it into my driveway, minutes away from bed. My mood would border on ecstatic, that is if I wasn’t tired to the point of numb.

Turn the knob slowly, quietly, so close to the end. Down the hall, last door on the left, open that door slowly too, as Christine would already be in bed. She works long hours too, but her agency has the decency to cease work early on Friday afternoons. An empty wine glass and a book on her night stand, sound asleep with a half smile on her face. I pause for a moment to admire her beauty, exhaustion replaced by contentment as I undress and climb into bed with her. I smile to myself as I wrap my arms around her and settle into comfort, feeling reassured that sometimes life wasn’t so bad.

Christine stirred slightly, and snuggled into my arms, “how was your day?”
“Long, yours?” I say with the relaxation I had been so craving all day.
“It was nice, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the grocery,” more asleep than awake.
“Who’s that?” I ask, not caring in the least, so very happy to be in bed.

“That girl you used to see in college, Sylvia,” she smiles in a teasing fashion. With decent reason too, I’d dated Sylvia back when she was college roommates with Christine, Sylvia was beautiful and a lot of fun besides, but one night at her apartment she introduced me to Christine, and I knew that I had just met the girl I was to spend the rest of my life with. Christine still loves to tease me about Sylvia. I was too tired to put up a fuss tonight.
“Oh yea? What’s new with her?” I asked, again not caring much.
“She just got engaged.”
“I didn’t know she was really seeing anyone.”
“Apparently it was fairly sudden, you knew she took a job teaching ESL at that center off Franklin?”
“Right yea, what’s that have to do with engaged?”

“Well, apparently she had this student from Korea, you know how that area is mostly East African?”
“Yea, I guess I read something about there being a small Korean neighborhood randomly over there, but what’s that have to do with Syl?”
“Shhh, I’m telling you. So Sylvia has this student from Korea, and his English is already pretty solid, much better than the rest of her students, and they get along really well right from the start. He’s like her star pupil, which is funny to say, seeing as she’s 25 and he’s maybe thirty or just under. Anyway, he politely asks her out to coffee after class, and they end up talking for like five hours at the Korean coffee shop over by Zipp’s.”
“Jeez” I murmur, as content to be in bed as I can ever remember being, more asleep than awake..
“Right? So anyway, they go out again for coffee the next night, and for dinner the night after. They are just hitting it off perfectly, and she’s really starting to be a little smitten for this student of hers, which is a problem because though they’re both adults he’s still her student, and there are rules at this ESL school and all that.”
“Sylvia used the word smitten?” I tease.
“Well no, shut up, that’s not the point,” a little more animated now, “as I was saying, they are just hitting it off famously and somewhere after desert he grasps her hands, looks deeps into her eyes and tells her in his broken English that he loves her.”

“Ha, I bet that threw her for a loop.” She used to be such a drama queen sometimes.
“That’s what I said, but she said she looked deep into his dark brown eyes and realized that she loved him too. Three dates, can you imagine? She used to be such a player, always with a couple guys lined up to take her out, and another couple from out of town always visiting.”
“That’s wild.” I say.
“Right? That’s not even the wild party yet.” Really excited now, there’s no way she’s going to let me sleep until we finish this story of Sylvia and her ESL lover.
“What more could there be?”
“So this student of hers goes on to tell her that he loves her, and he’d rather die than spend another day without her as his wife, yada yada, he asks her to marry him and she says yes.”
“Wow, that’s something.” Sarcasm.
“That’s nothing. So she accepts this Korean guy’s proposal, and they’re both laughing and crying and carrying on and the whole restaurant is going crazy cause they’re both so happy, right?”
“right…”
“So the Korean guy then goes on to tell her that they have to leave immediately to go back to Korea to tell everyone and make the arrangements, and how its going to be such a big deal to his people. His People. This is where things get a little strange.”

“What about this hasn’t been a little strange so far?” I ask, slightly annoyed now.

“It turns out this Korean ESL student of hers is the crowned prince of South Korea, next in line for the throne,” Christine exclaims, wide awake and now out of breath, “he was in the states to learn English and gain an appreciation for our culture, he took Sylvia’s ESL class just to the experience life as a common Korean immigrant in America.”

Silence.

“Christine,” I whisper into the silence, “I’m sorry for not taking you seriously when you used to whine about what a princess Sylvia used to be back in college.”

Anonymous Pregnant Woman

I liked being an anonymous pregnant woman in public. However much I suffered from loneliness and fear in my own world, when I stepped out into the street, I was just a pregnant woman like any other you might find in a magazine. Being pregnant made me feel invincible, powerful; like a protected species.

There was a game I liked to play when I went on walks. Head up, I looked neither left nor right. With complete steadiness and total disregard for the traffic around me, I would step off the curb and onto the street without looking, confident that nobody would hit me.

Even if a car happened to collide with my body and kill it, so what? I would have died in honor and been doubly missed, like a valiant warrior fallen in battle and destined for an afterlife in Valhall. Because of pregnancy, my death would have been more meaningful than that of any other pedestrian. My life would have had more value somehow.

Headlines would read, “Expectant young mother fallen, life cut short” or something of that nature and people would say in passing, “How sad? Isn’t that sad? She had so much to look forward to.” It’s true. People take it real hard when a pregnant woman dies. Any pregnant woman.

So I would step off the curb and, staring straight ahead, listen to the delicious sounds of squealing tires and apologies shouted out in panic. No one ever even so much as honked at me. It felt good.

I could have been any pregnant woman out of a magazine, with a flush on my cheek and new clothes blossoming out over my stomach. All I had to be was a body, a passageway from the past to the future. Could have been anyone, or no one, even.

Always Enjoy Responsibly

I am drinking a bottle of beer. The label on it reads, “Always Enjoy Responsibly,” with the first letter of each word capitalized. I’m slightly over the edge of tipsy and it’s reading true to me, now. Each word is capitalized for a reason.

Always. That means: be consistent. That means: there’s a life history there that needs to be accounted for. That means: you know you always go overboard with this stuff, dammit. Learn the fucking lesson already.

Enjoy. That means: there’s a fine, orgasmic line between enjoyment and terror. Enjoyment is when you’re engaged and having a good time. Terror lies just beyond that, when the enjoyment is gone and all that’s left is this uncontrollable ride from which you cannot get off.

Responsibly. That means: Watch Out, because what’s coming up next is gonna knock you on your ass. It means that wild careening at the end of Snow Hill is going to have Ethan Frome-like consequences. It means that someone – probably you - will end up paralyzed with bitterness and pain.

Yes. I’m drinking the beer and thinking about how beer tastes like a mixture of semen and water and bread. In my mind, semen is equated with ego, water with mindless work, and bread with warmth. It’s idiosyncratic, I know, but there it is. It makes me think about how I’m being fucked.

I’m thinking about how I want to quit my job because I’m not having a good time anymore. It’s turning into a bad trip. I want to bail. I can’t even remember why I used to think it was fun.

I tell my husband this over my fourth beer and he says, “You’re so predictable. You’re just getting burnt out, that’s all. Think it over for awhile.”

That brings me back to Always. I’m just going in circles here.

Waiting

Waiting. I think of my life now as waiting for something to happen. Waiting for some opportunity to come along. I feel very much like I am passing the time, waiting for something important.

When I was little, I spent a lot of time waiting. We didn’t have a car and my mother would coordinate these complicated bus passages around town, sometimes with one or two hours wait between transfers to some unheard of suburb. I didn’t understand – and still sometimes don’t – why we would go to the trouble, just for some half-hour rehearsal segment for choir or two-bit dance recital in a mall no one ever went to. Maybe she was bored.

But I remember waiting. Waiting for the last bus on summer nights or worse – on winter nights, when the cold was so fierce that I would lose sensation in my toes. It’s very real to me – I can close my eyes and see snowflakes swirling down about me in the glow of streetlights and my humid breath condensing into droplets on the wool of my scarf, pressed close against my cheeks and lips.

I remember one time waiting late at night at outside a bus shelter and watching a woman masturbate inside. She was developmentally delayed and laughing insanely as she reached up into her skirt. She was masturbating, I suppose, just to pass the time. I was only ten years old or so at the time, but I remember thinking that I guessed she had find some way through all that waiting.

Dig You in Deep

Three little girls and a youngish mother are standing in the sandbox at the playground. Jane (5) and her mother are well dressed. Lulu (7) and Betsy (5) are sisters, dressed in clothes that are slightly too small and somewhat out of style.

Mama: Come on! Don’t you want to make another sandcastle?

Jane: I have an idea! I’m gonna bury you, Mama.

Mama: Bury me? Oh noooooo! Don’t bury me!

Lulu: Can we play?

Jane: C’mon! Let’s bury her!

Betsy: Yeah! We’re gonna bury you!

Lulu: We’re gonna dig you in deep!

Mama (playfully): NO! Oh no! How ever will I get out?

Lulu: We’re gonna dig you in so deep, you’ll never get out.

Betsy: You’ll stay there forever and ever!

Jane: Yeah. Forever!

Mama: But what if I get hungry? Or thirsty?

Betsy: That’s too bad.

Jane: Yeah, that’s too bad.

Lulu: No food for you. We’re gonna dig you in so deep, you won’t even get food stamps.

Mama: Someone will rescue me.

Jane: Oh no they won’t. We’ll tell them not to.

Betsy: We won’t let anyone rescue your mom.

Mama: My fairy godmother will come and break me out!

Lulu: Oh no she won’t. There ain’t no such things as fairy godmothers.

Betsy: Yeah. They’re not real.

Mama: Well then a giant earthquake will rumble underground and crack me outa this sand.

Jane: Uhuh.

Betsy: There aren’t any earthquakes here. That won’t work.

Mama: Well, your Mama will come and dig me out.

Lulu: Na-ah. Our Mom’s not here. She’s at home ‘cuz her boyfriend’s over.

Betsy: We might hafta move to another apartment.

Mama: Well, then. When the sky gets dark and everyone else goes home, the trees will start moving around. They’ll see me stuck in here and feel sorry for me and pull me out.

Betsy: Trees don’t move!

Jane: Yeah! Trees don’t move. That’s silly.

Mama: Well, then giant turtles underneath the sand will wake up and lift me out of here.

Lulu: That’s silly. Only God can lift you up!

Betsy: Yeah! And God is dead!

Voice (offstage): Lulu! Betsy! Git your butts back in the house before I hafta come after you! Quit buggin’ that woman and git over here!

Lulu: Ok ok. We gotta go.

Mama: Well, it was nice playing with you girls? Wasn’t it, Jane?

Jane: Yeah. It was nice playing with you.

Betsy (threateningly): You better be here when we get back tomorrow. We’re gonna dig you in all the way up to your eyes!

Betsy and Lulu run offstage.

Jane: Mama. If your fairy godmother doesn’t come, I’ll dig you out.

Mama: Thanks, pussycat. She’s probably just a little busy right now. The end of the month is real busy for fairy godmothers.