Day 2

There’s a poster up in my supervisor’s cubicle that reads “what am I doing here?” For a second I thought maybe it was some kind of office humor, but then read the smaller print – it’s about church, and god - the bigger “here” in “what am I doing here?” 

I started this temp job yesterday. Before I was allowed to walk past the reception desk I had to read ten pages regarding nondisclosure of information, appropriate working behavior, and signed three different papers saying I wouldn’t give away company secrets.

The office looks brand new, it’s on the 17^th floor of a high-rise downtown, and it takes two elevators to get there from the ground floor.  The furniture is mod 60’s style, and reminds me a little of Mad Men after they move into their new offices. There is a huge flat screen TV installed at reception, and three more on the walls of a circular break room area that looks like Diane Keaton’s house in Sleeper. All of the TVs are muted, not even with subtitles to read, just silent home and garden shows and CNN stories, all day long.  The kitchen area has an enormous silver double door refrigerator, and there’s free coffee – some in big containers, some in those little pod things that make you one cup at a time in different flavors. 

It is a remarkably quiet office. The only sounds I hear from my cubicle are of people typing, filling their cups with water and coffee in the corner behind me, and talking on the phone. It’s like being on a spaceship, a really quiet spaceship, like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There was nothing in my cubicle when I arrived except for a brand new ergonomically designed chair and a computer. I asked the receptionist for a stapler, and some staples to go with it.  She unlocked a clean, brightly lit, organized supply closet, handed me a stapler, reached into a box of staples, and removed one thin row. When I asked for thumbtacks the next day she opened the same supply closet, pointed to an open container of thumbtacks and said “be very, very careful,” in a voice generally reserved for three year-olds. 

This is an end-of-the-line job for me. I’ve interviewed for so many jobs I’ve stopped counting. At one point this spring I was up for six different positions at once; none of them were offered to me. This is the third temp agency I’ve signed up with, and the first that has found me work, so I accepted the assignment when it was offered to me. 

At home, the letters Y E S are strung across the kitchen wall. They are old movie house marquee letters. Each one is dark red, 12 inches high, weather-beaten, with a groove on the side that hangs onto the marquee. With so much rejection, it’s nice to see YES sometimes. 

My husband asked me how my first day on the assignment went.  “Okay,” I replied, “I almost cried a couple times.” I can’t help it - I know I’m not the only one going through this right now, and I know it could be worse, but sometimes it’s hard to get excited about it could be worse. It feels ridiculous that I can’t pay my half of the mortgage, or that I haven’t paid one cent of our credit card for months. This stage of my life was supposed to be over decades ago, and as humiliating as it is to be doing temp work, it makes me feel better to have an income – a tiny income, but at least something to defray the cost of my existence. “The office is really, really quiet,” I continued, “it’s circular like a spaceship so it’s hard to find my cube, but I guess that’s better than rows and rows of cubicles. The person I’m replacing has the same last name as me so everyone thinks we’re related. I met her. There was a cake thing for her in the afternoon - she got promoted. She said she’s worked there for 8 years, and to consider this a way to get a full time position because they’re looking to replace her, and that it’s a good place to work, so… that’s nice.”  

Today was my second day, it was better than the first. I can find my cubicle, and I have an ID badge so I don’t have to sign in at the security desk every time I walk in and out of the building. When I came home the red marquee letters were strewn across the kitchen floor, one of the screws holding up the wire they were resting on had come loose from the wall.  They lay scattered around a pile of cat puke that I had discovered that morning and covered with a paper towel because I didn’t have time to clean it up before leaving the house. Later, one of the cats took a crap on the bathmat. My husband cleaned up the crap, and I cleaned the puke and put the letters back on the kitchen wall, hanging them on thumbtacks instead of wire. They’re off center and misaligned, but it’s nice to see YES sometimes, even if it’s a little off-kilter.

Rhinestone

So it’s come to this: I’m preparing to interview for a temp job; when I used to do temp work, not that long ago, I met with someone from a temp agency, and was placed at assignments sight unseen.  Now, more than three years after getting laid off and looking for work, I’m submitting to the possibility of being rejected for temporary work. My contact at the agency sends me a humiliating email telling me what to do: Please wear a suit, it says, as if I’m new to this, as if I’m a high school senior going on her first interview, as if I’ve never seen the inside of an office before. 

The definition of insanity, in a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I’ve been doing the same thing since June of 2009; I look at job postings, send a cover letter and resume to ones that look promising, go on interviews, sometimes get called back for a second interview, sometimes make it to the final two candidates, and never get offered the job.

I sleep poorly the night before; I wake up tired, bleary, and depressed.  I go through the morning ablutions of any regular working woman, and make my way to the brown line at 7:30am. As the train makes its way toward the loop, it gets crowded. It’s been so long since I’ve had a regular commute that it’s strange to see all the working stiffs on the train engaged in behavior that has become alien to me: people from around the city have gotten up early, showered, fixed their hair, put on a suit – maybe a tie, and gotten on the train where they sit or stand in a mute, deadened state, interacting only with their iPhones, iPads, and the odd newspaper. They get off downtown, walk into air-conditioned buildings and spend the day pretending that they don’t know any curse words.  I get off at Adams and Wabash and join the streams of people walking down the stairs moving urgently towards their destination. It looks like a carefully choreographed piece of performance art, or a salmon spawn. 

I find the building, and make my way to the security desk, where I get a temporary ID and pass through the corral that separates the public from a bank of elevators, and make my way to the 14^th floor.  Halfway through the second interview (there will be three in total) I’ve heard enough to I know I won’t get this job. As it turns out, I’ve been interviewing for a personal assistant position, but the description was for a development assistant position, and in retrospect it’s clear that I’ve answered some key questions incorrectly. I make my descent to the first floor and call the agency, as per my emailed instructions.  “Do you think you’d accept if they offered you the job?” they ask.  “Yes, I would,” I say, even though I know this won’t happen.

I go to Einstein’s Bagels to get coffee and something to eat, and as I walk in the door the theme to “Sanford and Son” plays on the audio system, like some kind of cosmic commentary on my life. I order a bagel and a small coffee, and the woman at the register recommends that I get the bagel and medium coffee combo because it’s cheaper.  It saves me about a dollar and a half, and it makes me feel protected somehow that this woman I’ve never met is looking after my financial well-being.  I sit at a table and pull out my Hallmark thank you notes from my purse, the cheapest kind available, $4 for a pack of 10, and my book of stamps.  I’ve been on roughly 30 in-person interviews and 10 phone interviews since I was laid off in 2009, and I like to think that my contribution to the greeting card industry and the US Postal Service has made a dent in the economic viability of both entities. I used to pore over every word in a thank you note and keep a copy of the text for future reference; now it comes out like so many prepackaged Hallmark messages: “Dear [name], thank you for taking the time to meet with me today regarding the open [job] position.  I enjoyed our conversation, and hope to have the opportunity to discuss this opportunity further. Sincerely…”

I’m downtown so rarely these days, and it’s usually for some humiliating interview, so I make sure to build in other, more practical reasons to be there so it doesn’t feel like a total waste of train fare and effort when I ultimately get rejected, and I’d noticed a couple days earlier that one of the rhinestones in my eyeglasses had fallen out.  They’re LaFont frames; an extravagant purchase, they are by far the most expensive thing that I wear, excluding my engagement ring.  It took me a year to convince myself to buy them. They sit perfectly on the bridge of my nose, making my face appear neither too large nor too small, they are feather light, and I’ve owned them for about four years. My last trip downtown was for a farewell lunch for a former coworker who’s relocating to San Francisco, and I sat silent as my former colleagues caught up on their work lives. Dan talked about his upcoming job change, and spoke in disparaging terms about his current supervisor, who didn’t make a counteroffer when he told her that he’d been offered a job elsewhere, securing his opinion of her and of his current workplace.  It was like listening to aliens talk about alien things dressed in alien clothes; I had nothing to add to the conversation. My built-in practical reason for being downtown that day was to visit the optician who’d filled the prescription for me.  He couldn’t help with my missing rhinestone, but gave me the business card of someone who works in the Jewelers Building at 5 South Wabash, and recommended that I try there. 

Thank you notes written, coffee and bagel consumed, I got up and made my way to South Wabash.  I rode the ancient, creaking elevator in the Jewelers Building to the eleventh floor and walked into the wrong studio – an expensive looking, brightly lit establishment that specialized in watches.  They weren’t sure they could help me, and I’d have to leave the eyeglasses with them if I wanted their expertise.  I thanked them and left with my eyeglasses in hand.  As I approached the elevator again I saw the place listed on the business card – Danny & Debbie Jewelers, it was tucked behind the elevator bank in a moldering two room studio with a view of an alley.  In the back room, a man in his late 50s or early 60s who must have been Danny worked on a piece of jewelry, in the front room dusty display cases that were mostly empty housed a few pairs of silver earrings, and a plate with the Aztec sun calendar hung on one wall.  I explained to a dark-haired woman who must have been Debbie what I needed, and she went to a shelf stacked with boxes of rhinestones.  She pulled one down and Danny joined her in poring over them.  They spoke to each other in Spanish, and I tried to understand them. Debbie referred to Danny as “Papa,” and I heard him use the word “chiquita,” which I’ve only heard in reference to bananas.  I made a mental note to look it up.  “Esta, papa,” she said, holding a tiny purple rhinestone in a pair of tweezers. Danny affixed the rhinestone into my eyeglass frames, told me not to wear them for a few hours, and retreated into the back room.  I packed the eyeglasses into my bag, and pulled my wallet out, but Debbie made no move to write up an invoice or ask for payment.  “What do I owe you?” I asked.  “Oh, like, a dollar,” she said.  

On the train ride home I reflected on the events of the morning: for less than half of what it cost for me to ride the train downtown for my useless interview, two people worked earnestly to replace a tiny rhinestone that only I knew was missing. A few days later I would get a phone call from the temp agency, which I would let go to voicemail.  I played it back, and missed the first few seconds because I was fumbling for the speakerphone button.  “…great news” the voice on the message said, but the intonation was flat.  I rewound to the beginning and heard the phrase in its entirety: “Unfortunately I’m not calling with great news…”  

I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to find a job for three years, but it only took a minute for Danny and Debbie to find a rhinestone for me.  The color isn’t an exact match, but only I know which rhinestone it is.  I like the fact that it doesn’t match perfectly; it reminds me of the small dignities that still exist in the world.

The Weather Report

I performed at The Paper Machete for the first time this afternoon, it was fun - and very different from my usual stuff.  For once I read about something other than me, which was kind of refreshing.   I hope to do more Paper Machete readings, and I hope you enjoy the following piece.

The Weather Report

Memorial Day weekend kicked off the unofficial beginning of summer in Chicago with a long list of outdoor activities: street closures due to construction caused headaches for motorists; the beaches officially opened, allowing Chicago area E. Coli enthusiasts to bathe in fetid waters from Belmont Harbor to Oak Street Beach and beyond; and farmers markets around the city opened for the season. The official start of summer happened this week with the arrival of the summer solstice on June 20, which is a day earlier than usual because 2012 is a leap year.  Also early this year: the annual summer shooting sprees. Type the words “shooting” and “Chicago” into any search engine and you’ll find news items and blog posts regarding recent gun violence. Ten people died from shotgun wounds in Chicago over Memorial Day Weekend alone, 8 died and over 40 were injured in gun related violence the weekend of June 8-10. With the unseasonably warm winter we just had, the seemingly weather-induced violence began as early as March. In a recent NPR piece, Dr. Jens Ludwig, head of the University of Chicago's crime lab, said higher temperatures bring more people outdoors, which seems to lead to more crime.

DR. JENS LUDWIG: And we know that when there are more people out and about there are just more opportunities for crime. And so, I think the thing that everybody is talking about - mild, wet winter weather - might actually be a contributing factor to this thing that we're seeing.

Chicago has long been known for its violence; before the advent of Michael Jordan, the usual trope heard in foreign cities by visiting Windy City residents was “Chicago, bang bang,” thanks to Public Enemy #1, Al Capone; a figure who left Chicago with a mixed legacy.  I can’t think of another American city that clings to its felonious past with as much pride and enterprise; if you log onto www.gangstertour.com you can make reservations for something called Untouchable Tours, which is described on their homepage, appropriately enough, in bullet points.

EXPERIENCE...Chicago as it was during the 1920s and 30s!

SEE...the old gangster hot spots and hit spots!

HEAR...historically accurate accounts of the exploits of Capone, Moran, Dillinger and the rest a da boys!

FEEL...the excitement of jazz-age Chicago during the era of Prohibition!

ENJOY...a journey into the past as we cruise the city in search of the old hoodlum haunts, brothels, gambling dens and sites of gangland shootouts! 

I don’t think weather had much to do with 1920’s gangland Chicago, there were other factors: prohibition high on the list. So what is it about warmer weather that seems to make us more violent? We hole up all winter long, ordering pizza and watching cable TV so we won’t have to go outside, we only leave the cocoon of our homes to walk our dogs and dig our cars out from under twenty inches of snow. We long for the day that we can open the windows and walk around the house in our underwear. We imagine that warmer temperatures mean going outside and socializing more, and when summer actually arrives, socializing more can mean anything from barbequing in the backyard, to watching movies in the park, to a drive-by shooting.  Does the heat literally make our blood boil? 

In a recent piece in Medill Reports, Arthur Lurigio, a professor of social psychology and crime expert at Loyola University in Chicago, suggested that the culprit is not the temperature so much as it is people leaving their homes. 

“People who commit crimes are just as susceptible to the weather as law abiding citizens are… more people spend time outside when the weather is nice, which can facilitate everything from pickpocketing to gang violence. And with 83 percent of homicides in 2011 having been committed outside, it’s no surprise that monthly crime rates would be higher when the weather is more temperate.”

This could lead one to conclude that it’s not the heat, and it’s not the humidity, its contact with other people that increases the probability of violence. Perhaps Chicago should consider changing its motto, “I Will,” to be more specific.  “I Will Be 83% More Likely To Kill You Outdoors,” or: “If The Mercury Rises Above 90 degrees, I Will Be More Likely To Shoot You.”  If that’s too wordy, we could always get literary and go with the famous Jean-Paul Sartre line from No Exit, “Hell Is Other People,” which would make a great travel poster, and would confuse and irritate tourists, figuratively killing two birds with one stone.

The recent spike in violence has not gone unnoticed and earlier this week I received an email from my Alderman, Richard F. Mell, which included the following item:

4)  This Saturday, June 23, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. there 

will be a gun turn-in drive at 23 locations throughout the city.

The closest collection site to our ward is the Uptown Baptist 

Church on 1011 W. Wilson.  For more facts and all locations, click on:

 http://33rdward.org/Gun.pdf

There’s an embedded link in the email that takes the reader to a pdf document listing ten frequently asked questions regarding the gun turn-in, typed in all caps, which is generally considered “yelling” on the Internet, which I guess is appropriate:

1.      WILL ANYONE ASK HOW OR WHERE I GOT THE GUN?

Answer: No

2.      WHERE CAN I USE THE PREPAID VISA DEBIT CARD? (part of the gun turn-in incentive is debit cards in exchange for firearms)

A: anywhere that accepts Visa debit cards.

3.      HOW MANY GUNS CAN I TURN IN?

A: every gun turned in will be accepted, and each gun will be exchanged for a prepaid debit card.

4.      WHAT HAPPENS TO GUNS AFTER I TURN THEM IN?

A: all guns turned in will be destroyed.

5.      CAN I TURN IN A BB, REPLICA OR AIR GUN?

A: yes, BB guns turned in will be exchanged for a $10 debit card; toy guns will not.

6.      DO I HAVE TO GIVE MY NAME TO VISA IN ORDER TO USE THE CARD?

A: no.

7.      WHAT IF I CAN’T MAKE IT BETWEEN 10:00AM AND 4:00PM SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2012?

(For instance, what if I’m reading a piece at the Paper Machete?) A: you can always dial 911 or turn in your gun to a police station; however, only guns turned in on June 23 will be exchanged for a prepaid debit card.

8.      WILL I GET ANY MONEY FOR MY BULLETS, MAGAZINES OR HOLSTERS?

A: no, however, you may turn them in.

9.      CAN I TURN IN PART OF A GUN OR GUN PARTS FOR A PREPAID VISA DEBIT CARD?

A: no, but feel free to turn them in.

10.  HOW DO I GET ADDITIONAL INFORMATION?

A: call the CAPS Implementation Office at 312-745-5900.

Perhaps you marked the solstice this week by going to one of the museums that stayed open late – the MCA or the Peggy Notebaert; maybe you got up extra early for the Sunrise Yoga Cruise with Shoreline Sightseeing; perhaps you were lucky enough to catch JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound at the Pritzker Pavilion; or maybe you got your Pagan on, erected a scale model of Stonehenge in your backyard, and got stoned. However you chose to mark the advent of summer in Chicago, approach this hottest of seasons with caution: buy a new thing of sunscreen, chances are the old one in your medicine cabinet has expired; the same goes for bug dope.  Splurge on a big floppy hat for added sun protection and a pair of fashionable UV blocking sunglasses.  If you’re a beachgoer, buy a pair of flip flops or water shoes so your feet won’t get all burnt up on hot sand and cut up on broken glass.  And most importantly – no matter how high the mercury rises keep a cool head, turn in your guns to your local police station, and consider spending more time indoors. It might be the best decision you make this season.

Little JP - for TW and MA

I am eleven, perhaps twelve years old but I look younger. On the back porch of the house on 1^st Street, balancing precariously on the edge of the railing above the 20 foot drop to the backyard of our 100 year-old brownstone, I hold a Siamese kitten in one hand, and the wand from a bottle of bubbles in the other.  Slightly out of focus, the photo looks older than it actually is.  It is the early 80’s, but my friend Shelley tells me it looks “quintessentially 70’s” due to the frizz in my hair and the earth tones in my clothing.  Straight hair had come back into style full force by then, and I’d given up battling my mane.  My mother and sister both had tame hair, and as an even younger child, I’d tried to brush my hair straight, which only exacerbated the problem. I am so focused on the task at hand that I do not acknowledge the camera, no doubt being held by my mother.  I’m wearing pink plastic eyeglasses, they are the second pair I owned – I was first fitted for glasses at age 10. 

  

The overalls were a staple of my wardrobe; I owned two pairs – one blue and one rusty orange, and wore them constantly. Newly transplanted to Brooklyn from an unincorporated town outside of Geneva, Switzerland, where our closest neighbors were dairy farmers, I was inexperienced with city life, or the idea that clothes might be an important indicator of personality. Tracy McTeague nicknamed me “Fannie Farmer” because of those overalls, and the name stuck.  My mother took me clothes shopping every fall before the school year began, and it would be several months before she bought me anything new to wear.

Everything about Brooklyn was foreign: the noise, the dirt, even the climate -- that first summer I developed heat rash on my neck and under my arms from the humidity, and when I started fourth grade that fall, was ostracized by my more culturally adept peers.  I had never gone to public school, and was overwhelmed by the mad crush of unruly kids, the endless lines that had to be stood in – to go to recess, to return from recess, to go to music class; the assigned tables in the lunchroom; and the perpetual wrath of the overworked, underpaid teachers who didn’t have the time or energy to take note of any new students. 

I hadn’t grown up watching American television, or any television for that matter, and didn’t understand the cultural references that my peers took for granted.  I was fascinated by cartoons and watched programs considered too young for me: Scooby Doo; Batman & Robin; Woody Woodpecker. The teacher led a discussion of the made-for-TV movie The Day After in class the day after it aired, and I was the only student who hadn’t watched it.  When the teacher asked why, I replied “I didn’t know it was on,” prompting riotous laughter. “How could you have not known it was on?” My classmates asked. 

My sister, six years my senior, went to a private high school and took the B67 bus to Pearl Street every day.  I went to P.S. 321 because it was across the street from our house, on the corner of 1^st Street and 7^th Avenue. My mother worked full time, and stayed at work late into the night on a regular basis; my father stayed behind in Switzerland, and our contact dropped to the occasional letters he typed on crinkly, light weight airmail stationary, and two visits per year.  

I became responsible for myself; I cooked Stouffer’s frozen and Bird’s Eye boil-in-bag meals, and became more connected to the cats in our house than to any human.  We bred our female Siamese cat with a male who belonged to one of my mother’s coworkers, and within weeks there was a litter of four tiny, blind, pink kittens – two males and two females.  They were my constant companions, following me up and down the three floors of our house, playing with my shoelaces, bits of string, and each other. We found homes for three of them, and kept one.  

This photo used to make me sad because it symbolizes everything that was lost when we moved back to Brooklyn: family life as it had once existed; the pastoral landscape of rural Switzerland and the sense of safety that it afforded; the easygoing attitudes of my teachers and classmates at the International School where my quirkiness was noted, but accepted.  Looking at it now I can appreciate it for the strengths it symbolizes: my self-reliance; my unruly, tomboyish ways; my lifelong bond with cats; and the inward-focused intensity that grew with being transplanted to a foreign place. I can’t say that I would do it all the same way if some magical being offered me the chance to do it over, but it made me who I am – my strengths and weaknesses, my dark sense of humor, my lifelong attachment to cats, my traveler’s spirit, and my constant inner dialogue.  It taught me to never feel alone, even when I am the sole human in the frame.

Me and Luke

If there’s one bar I’ve always wanted to drink in, it’s the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, from the first Star Wars.  As a child I was fascinated by the curious assortment of aliens who patronized the establishment: the creature that looks like a crocodile in a red beret sipping from something that resembles a Molotov cocktail; the bug-eyed instrumentalists; the mousy creature asking the bartender for another.  Obi Wan Kenobe saves Luke’s ass in that bar, establishing his role as protector and mentor. Although Mos Eisley is clearly dangerous, it also serves all kinds, and I get the feeling I might like it there.

On Easter Sunday of 2000, my sister and I split a list of phone numbers and sat in our respective homes, she in Boston and me in Chicago, faced with the task of calling relatives and family friends with unpleasant news. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone –most people were traveling, and cell phones were still a novelty. I left messages. I’d been at my boyfriend’s parents when I got the news myself. There had been indications that this might happen. I’d had a bad feeling the night before, while attending a concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I don’t remember who was playing, but a blanket of despair came over me during the performance and froze me in place. A thought had crept in on the fog outside and lodged itself in my brain: what would it take for her to attempt suicide?  She was miserable, disheveled, her body suffering from decades of alcohol abuse. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her wear anything besides sweatpants -- this from a woman who had a personal shopper at Rodier on trendy Newbury Street in Boston, and updated her wardrobe annually - at great expense. When my sister called the next day, I already knew what she was going to say.

I have a tremor in my right hand, it manifests when I try to raise something to my face: a glass of water; a utensil; a tube of lipstick. My husband noticed it before I did, and made me see a neurologist.  “Have you ever noticed,” the doctor asked, “that the shaking subsides after a glass or two of wine?”  “Um….no,” I replied.  “The alcohol helps to calm the nerves,” he explained.  I’m fairly certain that’s the only time alcohol will be prescribed to me. It turned out to be hereditary-- my mother’s hands shake but I always thought it was from drinking (although I’m sure that doesn’t help.) My grandfather’s hands shook, but I thought it was from age. 

It makes me self-conscious, and I do a lot with my left hand to hide it.  I mouse with the left on computers, I lift beverages with the left (what would people think if they saw me lift a pint to my face with a shaky hand?) It’s a constant reminder of where I come from, of the shaky woman who birthed me. It reminds me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when, in a fight for Luke’s soul, Darth Vader cuts off Luke’s hand with a light saber and says, between mechanical breaths: “Luke, I am your father.” Luke tries in vain to deny his parentage, but it’s no use; “Search your feelings,” Vader says, “you know this to be true.” In a later scene, Luke has been fitted with a prosthetic covered in a black glove. You can buy plastic action figures of Luke that have a pink left hand and a black right hand.  It is a symbol of Luke’s connection to the Dark Side, and to the fact that he cannot escape his lineage.  Like him, I have in my right hand a constant reminder of where I come from, of the dark forces in my heritage.

It wasn’t until her suicide attempt that I began going to ACOA – Adult Children of Alcoholics, in a post-war building on the north side that smells like cigarettes and plastic chairs. The first time I read the list of ACOA traits was like reading a high school detention report; revelatory, and disturbing. Listed before me were all the traits that I had believed were part of my personality, but as it turned out were just symptoms of growing up in a diseased household: We guess at what normal is; We judge ourselves harshly; and, the most damning one for me to read -- It is easier for us to give in to others than to stand up for ourselves. At night she’d come up the stairs in a drunken rage to yell at me, and I’d cower in a corner of my bedroom, silent, waiting for the moment she’d slam the door behind her so hard that objects flew from the walls. In the morning we’d both behave as if nothing had happened. 

Thinking about it makes me tired.

In my apartment, after leaving messages letting people know that mom was in the hospital and we didn’t know what was going to happen, I manically cleaned to distract myself. I took breaks when the phone rang and spoke to mom’s friends – some in tears, some curt and businesslike.  I hadn’t heard from any of them in years. None of them knew what to say to me. In fact, I haven’t heard from any of them since, except to decline invitations to my wedding the following year. 

“Well, at least it’s out in the open now,” Irene said after I’d told her this was the culmination of a lifetime of drinking and depression. Her words fell like fresh cat turds on my newly mopped kitchen floor. At least now? Was she kidding me? My mother had driven drunk to Irene’s country house in Vermont, and gotten pulled over after sideswiping an 18 wheeler and spent the night in jail.  I’d had to make a phone call to Irene that night too. At Irene’s home in Chevy Chase Maryland, at another Easter, my mother had tripped down the stairs to the bathroom and thrown up in Irene’s toilet. 

A few nights after speaking to Irene I had a dream that my boyfriend and I were looking for a new apartment and were considering renting a coach house from Irene.  The space was great, the rent was reasonable, but there was a problem – there was a woolly mammoth that charged the front door at random intervals.  I knew what it meant – there was an elephant in the room, and not just any elephant – a prehistoric one, because this issue was fucking ancient, and nobody wanted to deal with it, not even our prospective landlord.

I had just started a new job a couple months prior, and when I told my boss what had happened he asked if I wanted to fly to Boston.  I did.  Nobody knew how bad it was. If these were her final days, I wanted to be by her side, limited as she was in her parenting. I got a half-price ticket on United Airlines citing emergency circumstances (it still cost me over $600).  When I got to the hospital a curtain had been pulled around her bed, and a social worker was asking her questions.  I struggled with the ethics of listening in on a conversation that I wasn’t meant to hear, and in the end my curiosity won out – the questions were important, and as her daughter, I wanted answers.  

“What did you take?” The disembodied voice of the social worker asked.

“Half a bottle of Tylenol, and half a bottle of Advil.”

“Did you realize that this could kill you?”

“No.”

“Knowing now that it could kill you, do you think you would have done it anyway?”  

There was a pause of maybe fifteen seconds, and then: “Yes, I think I would have.” 

Having completed her interview, the social worker pulled back the curtain, and my mother saw me sitting in a chair by the door.

“My God,” she said, blinking behind her glasses.

“Hi mom,” I said.

She behaved as though this was something that had happened to her, rather than something she’d done to herself. The details were nauseating; she’d taken the pills just before meeting a friend who was in town with her 8 year-old daughter.  They went to dinner and mom began to act strangely. Her friend asked what was wrong, and she confessed to what she’d done. 

In the hospital, she’d been prescribed what looked like a fast food shake to combat the effects of the pills.  She aimed it toward me, the plastic straw pointing at my face and playfully said: “Would you like a sip?” “No, thanks,” I said, and she laughed, as if it were some kind of inside joke. 

She reveled in the attention of her visitors, regaling them with tales of what had happened: “I felt a strange feeling in my stomach…” she’d begin, as if this were an adventure gone wrong, as if there were a different reason for us to be here.

I slept like a rock that week in my sister’s apartment; sleep is my go-to habit when faced with stress.  I can sleep through anything – I once slept through an earthquake.

There were conversations: with doctors, psychiatrists, aunts, family friends.  The pills had damaged her liver, no one knew how much. It was possible that she’d have to be on medication for the rest of her life. “It upsets us because it makes us think about our own drinking,” one family friend said, “was this a real suicide attempt or just a cry for help?” asked another. Suddenly I was the expert, fielding questions I couldn’t possibly know the answers to, soothing the fears of people coming out of the woodwork.  “It must be so hard knowing she’s in the hospital,” they said, misunderstanding the most basic tenant of the child raised in an alcoholic home: the time I least worry about my mother is when she’s in the hospital.  “I’ll keep you posted,” I said. “Posted” was implicit for bad news – funereal news.  I’d brought a black dress with me just in case.

We cleaned her house – me, my sister, and my two aunts. There were piles of unread New York Times and New Yorkers clogging the place up and giving it the feel of a recycling center.  Her ageing cat that I’d grown up with, who was now missing an eye and required a special low-ash diet for his urinary tract health did his best to distract me. My aunt Jean talked about her own struggles with alcohol; she hadn’t touched the stuff in years.  My aunt Donna filled the empty spaces with conversation. She offered to cook for us, to give us wake-up calls in the morning, and I welcomed it.

At the end of the week we met with the doctor, there was no permanent damage – she wouldn’t have to take medication, and there were no complications to her already compromised liver.  The cosmic unfairness of it hit me hard – she had cheated death, or at the very least, cheated permanent damage.  Meanwhile, much younger people in my life would be culled too soon: Lisa, who died at 25 of a congenital heart defect, leaving behind a toddler; Brad, who died of cancer before his 30^th birthday; Dara, who died a few months ago at age 40.  Death, like violence, is random – you can minimize your chances, but you can’t eliminate them. 

ACOA was useful up to a point – about a year and a half into my tenure a couple showed up who weren’t actually Adult Children of Alcoholics, but insisted on attending meetings.  “My name is Judy,” one of them said, “and I’m an Adult Child of a Child Abuser…” Being a room full of ACOAs, none of us was able to stand up for ourselves and tell them that while their problems were real and terrible, the help they needed was not in this room. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. One by one the core group of people I had come to depend on began dropping out. The last time I went, Judy was running the meeting. I haven’t been back since.

Luke Skywalker and I have more in common than I first realized; we were both born with one foot in Dark Side and the other in The Force.  We are both survivors – children without real parents, cobbling together our own families from the Wookiees, droids, and occasional Ewoks that we come across over the course of our lives. We are human children from another planet, and do not know Earth customs first hand.  Like Luke, I cannot control where I came from, but I can try to steer myself towards the future of my choosing. If I could, I’d buy him a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina. We could talk about Leia’s attraction to bad boys like Han Solo, I could ask if Lando Calrissian likes to drink Colt 45, and what the real reason is behind Yoda’s syntax. He could ask me about life on Earth, what it’s like to use a toilet (I never once saw a bathroom in Star Wars,) and we could compare right hands. I think we’d have a good time.

Oh Hai!

I've been away from the blog for a while... here's a snapshot of what's happened in the past 3 months: I quit my job at the end of December, was accepted into a certificate program for creative writing at the University of Chicago, and have continued to write for Gapers Block and Chicago Theater Beat.  In February I got to read for 2nd Story, and my piece was podcasted (here's the link: 2nd Story go to the story titled "My Boyfriend").  I've continued to read at live literature/storytelling venues, and have a bunch of ideas on the back burner of what to do next, but haven't completed any of them yet.  And I'm looking for a job, again, but at least this time it's on my own terms.

Earlier tonight I read at Tuesday Funk, the text of what I read is below.  I hope to start posting again regularly, it's been quite a while.

Thanks for reading,

J.H.

Fear of Commitment

Although we had been together for five years, and I had no plans to date anyone else, when my boyfriend and I got engaged to be married, I totally freaked out.  I didn’t have the greatest model of marriage from my parents, and I was afraid that this spelled the end of fun, and the beginning of bitter, angry bullshit. We lived in an old apartment with a toilet that constantly needed to have the handle jiggled to make it stop running, and I was distracted by the sound of it when we sat down to have a serious discussion.  “I’m scared that getting married will mean the end of fun,” I said, and cavalier as hell, he said: “The fun never stops with me, baby.”   “The toilet’s running,” I said, and to prove to me how much fun he could be in the domestic realm, he stood up, walked towards the bathroom and said “come here you.” 

Unlike the toilet, I could actually run away.  As it happened, my friend Joanie introduced me to her friend Jeff at around this time, and he seemed really intriguing – he was a writer, he was young, he lived in London, which seemed very exotic, and we began an email correspondence, sending each other flirtatious, well crafted messages that seemed harmless until Joanie and I decided to fly to London to visit him.  As soon as I saw Jeff at baggage claim I realized that I wasn’t attracted to him, I was attracted to the persona I had constructed in my mind using minimal email conversations and a long ago memory of a boy I went to summer camp with who was really punk rock and whose name was Arrow – which is the coolest name ever.  Jeff looked like a sock monkey, we could barely hold a conversation in person, and I was stuck with him for the next several days. 

The three of us decided to make a side trip to Amsterdam; Jeff said he knew his way around, so we bought cheap tickets and made the trip over, and it quickly became apparent that Jeff didn’t really know his way around at all.  He’d been once, for a weekend, and just wanted to impress us with his knowledge of the continent. We booked a crappy hotel room that had three cots in it, and was down the hall from a communal toilet that was always warm with the body heat of whoever had just used it, and couldn’t handle more than three sheets of toilet paper at a time. There was a shower in the same room with the toilet, but Joanie and I reduced our hygienic rituals to rinsing our armpits in the sink in our room while Jeff waited for us outside.  Joanie and I slept on top of our cots, fully clothed, even covered our pillows with t-shirts because those cots looked like they were crawling with VD, or at the very least, scabies, but Jeff had no problem stripping down to his boxers and getting in the covers of the bed to prove that he wasn’t afraid of getting VD from his cot. He said: “This is the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in Amsterdam,” which didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.

Joanie and I knew nothing about Amsterdam, except that it was rife with marijuana, so we went to a coffee shop – the kind where you can buy marijuana legally, where we were presented with a menu – it looked just like any menu, detailing all the different kinds of weed we could order.  We didn’t know the difference, we’re from Chicago. At the very bottom of the list was the cheapest item on the menu: a pre-rolled joint.  This was perfect because none of us were exactly experts in the art of rolling, so we ordered the thing, lit up, and began passing it around.  It wasn’t until my third toke that I remembered that weed in Amsterdam is much more powerful than the skunk weed I was somewhat familiar with in Chicago, and that I probably shouldn’t smoke it the same way - with deep intakes of breath, and holding it in as long as possible before exhaling.  By the time I remembered this it was too late - I was higher than I’d ever been in my life - we all were. It had taken us two minutes to get there, and now we had to figure out what to do with the rest of the evening.  

We decided to go for a walk, and Jeff led the way.  I experienced everything as if I were remembering something that had happened a long time ago, and not experiencing something in the moment, and it took me a long time to respond to stimulus.  I felt like I was half asleep on my couch, watching bad TV.  We walked past a street corner where someone had fallen, or been knocked down, and was bleeding and I thought: “I wonder if we should find a cop?” And a few minutes later, when I was able to process my next thought, it was this: I hadn’t seen any cops since we’d arrived in Amsterdam, and as far as I could tell, there was no reason to have any because pretty much everything was legal. I’m sure there are many cultural legacies of Holland in general, and of Amsterdam in particular, but our decisions had led us to explore what is essentially a theme park of vice: prostitution is legal, marijuana is legal, there are sex shows everywhere, it’s like Times Square in the 70’s, minus the weaponry and the Son of Sam.   

My motor skills had slowed considerably, and I found myself walking several feet behind Jeff and Joanie as Jeff led us through winding cobblestone streets, and through the red light district, where women stood behind glass panels at street level, tapping at the glass to get our attention – I guess it looked like we were some kind of threesome looking for a situation, and the sound of all those women tapping at the glass was overwhelming to my auditory sensibilities, it sounded like rain falling on a tin roof, it got louder and louder, and that’s when the paranoia kicked in.  In my mind Jeff and Joanie hated me, and were walking ahead of me because they were trying to get rid of me. I was never going to make it back home again; I was going to end up standing behind a wall tapping on the glass at passersby, never to see Chicago or my fiancé ever again.  I tried to psych myself out of that idea but it was a really persistent thought, and every time I managed to snap myself out of I became panicked with the ever-increasing distance between myself and my two cohorts, and the cycle began again. 

Finally we stopped at a felafel place where the three of us stared mutely at a short order cook who dumped frozen felafel into boiling oil; we stared at his every move like it was the most fascinating thing any of us had ever seen.  We were the only ones in the restaurant, and after feeling the weight of our zombie-like attention on him for several minutes, the short order cook looked at us and said: “you’re pretty quiet.” To which we said nothing.

I slowly began to come down from my high, and I was pretty sure that Joanie didn’t hate me, but I was still suspicious of Jeff.  I waited for Jeff to use the bathroom before I leaned over to Joanie, mustered up what was left of my cognitive powers and said: “Joanie, I thought you haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated me.”  Several seconds passed before Joanie responded. “I don’t hate you,” she said, “I love you.” That was about all could express to each other, but it was enough.  I’m not sure how Jeff remembers that trip, or Joanie, or the felafel guy, but I remember it as the time I flew 4,000 miles away from home, and smoked the strongest pot in the world with a man who looked like a sock monkey before realizing that the man I wanted to be with was waiting for me in an apartment in Chicago with a runny toilet, and that if he would still have me, I should get married to him while I still had the chance.  

I did eventually make it home, and I did get married. I didn’t smoke pot again for six years.

Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, and the lazy Susan

My husband saw it before I did.  It was Thanksgiving, and we’d made the drive from our house on the northwest side of Chicago to the western suburb of LaGrange to spend the holiday with my in-laws.  “Mom, why is there a swastika on the kitchen table?” he asked.  I looked to where he was pointing, and saw a wooden lazy Susan that looked like it was handmade, was an antique, and was sectioned off into quadrants with spindles of wood coming from the center, each one finishing in a right angle that, while useful as a kitchen storage unit, gave it a rather unfortunate appearance.  

“What swastika?” my mother-in-law asked, incredulous. 

“This one right here!” my husband said, his voice rising.  She looked at him, unblinking. 

“The lazy Susan,” I finally said, “it looks like a swastika.”  She walked over to the table and leaned her diminutive frame over the object in question.  

“Oh,” she said, “well now that you point it out I see it, but I never would have otherwise.”  I stood a fair distance from the lazy Susan, eyeing it from the kitchen counter, as if getting too close to it might be dangerous. Seeing the look on my face she said, “Oh, she doesn’t like it, I can tell.”

“It’s,” I began, and lost whatever it was that I’d begun to say. “I mean, it’s funny because…” and I lost my words again, resorting to sticking my hands out at my sides, palms up. “I mean, I wouldn’t go promoting it...”

“Where did you get this thing?” my husband asked.

“At a garage sale.”  What I really wanted to know was whose clever idea was it to make a lazy Susan in the shape of a symbol of tyrannical power, and more importantly, what else was up for grabs at that garage sale?

I have a long and complicated history with Judaism, which goes a little something like this: my maiden name is Cohen, I wasn’t raised religiously, and by most traditions I wouldn’t be considered Jewish because my mother isn’t – she was raised Christian Scientist, and didn’t meet a Jewish person until she went to college on the east coast, and then married one.  She divorced one too, but it still counts.

For most of my life people have not only assumed that I am Jewish, but have regarded me through that lens to explain certain behaviors - an appreciation for good pickles and matzoh ball soup for instance, and a tendency to avoid overt Christianity and the south. Over the years I’ve had various reactions to this, ranging from guilt that I don’t know more about Judaism, to anger that people would have the gall to assume anything about me based on my name. I once hung up on a teenage boy who called to ask for my financial support of a Jewish organization because it bothered me that I’d ended up on a list of prospects simply because of my name, and I was irrevocably peeved when a former boss of mine asked, on Ash Wednesday, “so when is your holiday?” My high school chorus teacher was an African-American woman who taught us negro spirituals. Halfway through "I've been 'buked and I've been scorned" she looked up from her seat on the piano bench with a smirk on her face. She turned her attention back to playing the piano, and when she looked at me again was smiling broadly. Finally she stopped playing completely and burst out laughing. "I'm sorry," she said between breaths, "but you have never looked more Jewish to me than you do right now."

By the same token, it feels wrong to have my Jewishness denied. The first winter I spent in Chicago I was surprised that the office buildings downtown don't display menorahs side by side with Christmas trees the way they do in New York, and was shocked when a coworker asked me if Cohen was a Catholic name.

Years ago I felt the need to learn more about “my” religion, (although I never felt that way about Christian Science), and kept renewing the same book on Judaism from the Bezazian branch of the Chicago Public Library before finally returning it, unread. A Quaker friend of mine once gave me a menorah that had belonged to his deceased partner, and I asked a Jewish colleague to phonetically spell out the prayer that accompanies the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. For one holiday season I observed the candle lighting tradition, and now the menorah decorates the top of our television, less a religious item than a household decoration.

One less letter and my name would have been Chen - would people have expected me to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese and make Peking Duck on the weekends? The worst offense was when people told me that I looked Jewish - for those of you who’ve never met her; I look exactly like my Scotch-Irish shikse mother. How on earth can a person look Jewish anyway? I mean, I know what people were trying to get at - I wear glasses, I have curly hair that goes frizzy in the humidity, and I listen to NPR. Nonetheless, these indicators would amount to nothing if it weren’t for the name Cohen, and ever since I took my husband’s name nobody has assumed that there’s anything Semitic about me.

Now that I don’t carry the name Cohen, I feel a little nostalgic for it whenever I see it in print, and I enjoy being called Cohen by people who knew me before I was married. My husband's name is Palmer, which carries no such religious weight, although it should - the first Palmers made a pilgrimage to the holy land and returned with palm leaves as proof of their journey.

A couple years ago I accidentally learned that my father’s family had lost six of nine children in the holocaust.  I overheard my father tell this to someone else, which is pretty much how I’ve learned everything about my family, not much got passed on to my generation from either side.  Knowledge, while highly valued in my family – going to college was pretty much a given for me, and both sets of my grandparents had access to higher education, is treated like something one should already have, not something to be sought out or shared. 

Compounding the problem is the fact that my father is a high functioning autistic, and he doesn’t react well to confrontation.  When I overheard him casually answer “yes,” to the question: “did you family lose anyone in the shoah?” Anger rose up from my stomach, through my esophagus and into the back of my throat, anger that I’d gone my whole life without knowing this crucial information, and I compressed it into small, pinched statements like: “that’s the first I’ve ever heard of this, dad.” “Oh?” he asked. “Do you have a family tree somewhere with the names?” I asked. “Oh no,” he answered, with a wave of a hand, “I had one once, years ago, but I threw it away.” The person my father was talking to said:“that’s criminal,” and I was glad to have a witness. “Why did you throw it away?” I asked, gripping the stem of my wine glass as if the only thing keeping me from committing patricide was that my hands were full. “Well, that’s not so nice,” he said - the same reaction he gives when anything upsets the flow of his daily life; like when the trains are running late, or he gets overcharged at the supermarket.  “Not nice?” I wanted to say, “You know what's not nice is?  Not nice is letting your dead, persecuted relatives be forgotten.  Does the phrase ‘never forget’ mean anything to you? People purposely pass on this information to their children.  Good job, dad.” What I actually said was: “It doesn’t matter if it’s not nice, it’s important.”

That night I woke alone in the dark, my subconscious wouldn’t let me sleep, or maybe it was the spirits of my murdered relatives. 

Since then I’ve gotten some information from my dad’s side of the family, a photocopy of a handwritten family tree, with the words: “died, Hitler era”, next to those who didn’t survive.  I’ve had conversations with my second cousin Emilie, who grew up knowing some of our relatives who had numbers tattooed on their forearms.  

From our email exchanges and phone conversations, it seems like Emilie and I have a lot in common: we both love to travel, have interests in the arts, and don’t have children.  When I went to Senegal a couple years ago she connected me with a friend of hers who lives there, and we’ve brought up the idea of visiting Lithuania, where our ancestors are from.  

I’ve attended Friday night services once or twice, and while I kind of feel like a giant poser, when someone wishes me “Shabbat shalom,” it’s nice.  I’ve also become – not obsessed, but very interested in holocaust documentaries.  I generally watch them by myself when my husband is out, which sounds dark and depressing, but I just can’t imagine snuggling up with a bowl of popcorn to watch footage of Soviet prisoners being let do their deaths on the eastern front, and interviews with octogenarian survivors describing acts of vengeance and resistance with a ferocity that I have never heard in anyone’s voice.  I add the films to our Netflix instant cue, where my husband sees them, and reads the titles aloud before scrolling right past them: “Forgiving Dr. Mengele...”  “You don’t have to watch that,” I’ll say, “That’s a special movie, just for me.”

I’m amazed at the stories of individual acts of defiance; the group of prisoners who broke into an SS locker room, changed into guards uniforms, and stole a vehicle.  When they drove to the prison gate, and the guard manning it didn’t lift it, one of the prisoners shouted “what is this, how long do we have to wait?” The gate was lifted, and they drove right out of Auschwitz.  Then there was the band of prisoners who hoodwinked a bunch of SS guards into meeting them, alone, in a workshop under the premise of having a pair of boots for them to try on, and killed them one by one with an axe.  They were able to do so because they knew that since the guards were German they would keep their appointments, and would show up on time, which sounds almost like a joke.  

I was dumbfounded by the film Inheritance which follows Monica Hertwig as she tries to sift through what it means to be the daughter of Amon Goth, who was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.  It wasn’t until she saw that film that she was confronted with what her father had really done, and in a blind, ignorant rage sent an angry letter to Steven Spielberg accusing him of spreading lies.  I watched all four plus hours of The Sorrow and the Pity, whose subject is the French Vichy government collaboration with the Nazis, and all six episodes of a TV series called: Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “final solution,” hosted by Linda Ellerbee, to name a few.  

I’m not sure what I hope to gain from this inundation of documentary material, sometimes I wonder if, in all the footage I’ve watched, I’ve seen my relatives stepping off cattle cars for selection, or witnessed images of their emaciated bodies.  Sometimes I think I can guess with pretty close accuracy at what must have happened to them, but that’s not the same as knowing.

 

Absorbing all this visual information has done something to me, given more weight to my center of gravity, made me aware of how easily and loosely the word “Nazi” gets used to describe the most inane displays of stubbornness, and as a stand-in for curse words, and it’s made me even less tolerant of the phrase “everything happens for a reason.”

Driving home from Thanksgiving, my husband and I discussed the lazy Susan.  “I know she didn’t see it, but what if that had been my first Thanksgiving with your parents?” I asked.  “Well, at least it was a lazy Swastika.” I considered what it would be like to be blind to the unintentionally swastika shaped objects in the world.  

Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, and maybe I’ll dig out the candles I bought for the menorah last year but never used, and maybe I won’t.  On Sunday, my husband and I will make the same drive out to LaGrange that we made at Thanksgiving, and despite the fact that none of us believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, we will celebrate his birth by sharing food and exchanging gifts.  I just hope the lazy Susan is gone by the time we get there.