And then there was the time I took an impulsive two-week road trip through the American Southwest. The city wasn’t doing anything for me and I needed to get out. I had a little bit of free time and a little bit of money and nobody who would miss me, not really, so I took off for Phoenix, and then Albuquerque, and eventually Tulsa, and on a whim Colorado Springs, and eventually I came back home.
I stayed with friends or crashed at roadside motels. I saw the Garden of the Gods in Colorado and the Blood of Christ Mountains in New Mexico and Arizona’s beautiful painted desert and I stayed on the trail. I bought art and fireworks and sang karaoke in a gay bar in Tulsa and flirted with the drag queen host and paid fifty cents for a smashed penny at the Will Rogers museum.
I chased the setting sun over the windmilled hills of southern California, and parked at the entrance of a reservation to soak in the unobstructed stars and the Cheshire cat smile of a sideways moon. I lost control of my car on an icy backroad and slid into a ditch of snow so deep that the truck that pulled in to tow me out got stuck and had to be towed out itself. I watched for falling rocks. I bewared flash floods. I decreased speed ahead while yellow lights were flashing.
I spent a lot of time by myself.
I stayed with Suzanne in Albuquerque and we drank wine and read out loud to each other things that we’d written and works in progress. We talked about our first celebrity crushes; mine was Mariah Carey, whose transformation from “Always Be My Baby” Girl Next Door to “Honey” Ridiculous Sex Cartoon seemed perfectly timed to track my developing puberty.
We spent almost 36 hours straight within 20 feet of each other, which means we basically just had one really long conversation, equal parts nostalgic and profound and goofy and dumb. We talked about our parents and our own uncertain futures and lingered outside a restaurant called the New York Pizza Department for a good forty minutes, play-acting a Law & Order type scene:
“New Yawk Pizza depahtment. What are we lookin’ at here?” “Well, officer, we got reports of a thin crust.” “Yeah?” “Then ya got some tomato sauce on that crust.” “Yeah? Sauce? We got some sauce?” “Then we’re talkin’ cheese—” “Is that melted cheese?” “I believe the cheese is melted, yes.” “Well, then I’ll tell ya what we got here…” “Yeah?” (LONG DRAMATIC PAUSE) “We got ourselves a pizza.”
We talked about our current love lives — or more specifically the dull consistent sting of not having one. I did my schtick: “I feel like every woman I meet I put in a box— I either find her phenomenally interesting and someone I want to have long conversations with into the night or I find her explosively attractive and sexually compelling, but never both, which means I end up not really interested in having a real relationship with anybody. Clearly this is something I do to myself because it’s just so much easier to not really care about anyone. It’s a gross pattern but I don’t really know how to get out of it. God, it’s all so boring.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Suzanne said, “You think everyone’s either a Tia or a Tamera.”
Suzanne and I used to date. Or rather, as I tell people, she’s an ex-girlfriend who I never actually got to a place with where I would call her my girlfriend. After a semester of false starts and reckless gropings and long painful conversations about feelings and misread signals and a devastating trip to the movie theater to see The Real Cancun (a film I remember primarily as the movie during which she refused to hold my hand), we ended the school year with a pair of endless emails, each outlining all the things we hated about each other, the long simmering grudges, the unspoken annoyances, all the ways in which we were both so horribly stunted and flawed and unworthy of each other. Then we didn’t talk all summer. In the fall, she bought me a Mall Madness for my birthday. We never mentioned the emails again.
Now Suzanne teaches an Edgar Allen Poe class at the University of New Mexico. Over the semester the class is going to read the author’s entire literary output, which means that when I visited they were at the part of his career where he still wasn’t very good yet.
“So, in this poem, there’s something kind of smug about his loneliness, isn’t there? Like he’s taking real pride in his isolation. Look at this line: ‘And all I loved, I loved alone.’ When you think of love, it’s usually a two-way street, right? Loving things alone, what is that?”
Suzanne packed me a lunch and gave me a copy of the literary journal she edited and made me a mix CD to listen to during my all-day drive to Tulsa. The first track on the CD was “Always Be My Baby.”
I stopped in New Mexico again near the end of my trip, three thousand miles, two speeding tickets, and one uncontrolled spin into a snow ditch later, this time staying with Anna in Espanola.
Over dinner Anna asked, “So when you stayed with Suzanne, did you guys hook up or what?”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”
“Why? What’s the point of even having exes if you’re not going to hook up with them?”
Anna teaches an adult education course in English as a second language. I visited the class and she asked me to give a brief presentation about myself so the students could practice their comprehension.
“I am Raphael,” I said. “I live in Los Angeles, California. I am not married, I am single. I am a writer. I have two sisters. I like to go to the beach. I like to hike. I like to watch television. I’m a good guy, so if you know any cute single girls, spread the word…” I meant this as a joke but nobody laughed. It might have been a little too “in English” for the room.
Watching Anna’s students grapple with the verb “to do,” it occurred to me that English can be a real cold sore of a language if you don’t know it. It’s a patchwork jumble of nonsense I can’t imagine trying to figure out as an adult. Struggling with a foreign set of vocabulary and syntax is awkward and embarrassing. You put yourself in a vulnerable position. You look stupid. And even still there’s no guarantee you’ll ever figure it out, not really.
But damn it if they don’t keep trying.
On the way home, I passed through the painted desert of Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park again. I parked my car and looked out over the wild untouched badlands. Nothing, just nothing, as far as I could see. I ate a peanut butter sandwich Anna had packed me and threw the baggie in the trash. Then I left the park map in my car and walked down into the desert.
Maya and I threw ourselves a Female Singer-Songwriters From When We Were In High School Youtube Party, and Dave indulged us. I played the above Fiona Apple video directed by Apple’s then-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson.
I said, “It’s weird that this song’s in Bridesmaids, a movie featuring P.T. Anderson’s new girlfriend.” I remembered how when Garden State came out Zach Braff said that he tried to get Paper Bag on the soundtrack (a detail I remember mainly for how annoyed I was that so much of his musical taste overlapped with mine), but Fiona Apple’s people said no. I wondered why she’d say no to that and yes to Bridesmaids (questions of quality aside), and I wondered what Maya Rudolph had to do with it.
Dave said, “Do you think P.T. Anderson got Jon Brion in the break-up?” We talked about the Extraordinary Machine album, how its release kept getting delayed, how Fiona’s fans protested the record label, made “Free Fiona” t-shirts and buttons, shared the leaked Brion-produced tracks, until Apple herself said she was the one unhappy with the record, and when it was released a year later, most of Brion’s contributions were scrapped. (Since then, Apple and Brion have in fact collaborated several times, and it’s tempting to invent an elaborate email correspondance detailing their reconciliation— “Look, man… Things got weird.”)
Maya said, “I feel like this is more a Paul Thomas Anderson video than a Fiona Apple video. It’s so glamorous. Look how uncomfortable she looks.” I said, “No, I think that’s just what she looks like,” but the observation reminded me of a photograph taken of me in a past life. It’s a picture of ______ and me the weekend we first met. We’re in a subway car. My arm is around her and I’m smiling broadly. She’s looking down into her purse. In this past life I always liked the photo because I thought it spoke to how happy ______ made me, and how quickly she meant so much to me. She hated the picture. “We hardly knew each other then. You were so presumptuous, to put your arm around me. I remember thinking, what is he doing?”
I knew what she was saying, but I couldn’t help loving the photo. The picture was taken before I knew she hated getting photographed and in fact it was one of the few pictures I had of her, of us together. I couldn’t help how grateful I was to have met her and how much the picture filled me with warmth. It’s funny how instinctively we attribute meaning to things— pictures, songs, relationships, lives. We like to create narratives, control things somehow, make the stories our own.
After ______ and I broke up, years after, in another life, I pulled out the old picture once when I was feeling nostalgic, but somehow, suddenly — and irreparably — I couldn’t help seeing what she saw.
I certainly appreciate all the time, money, and energy you and the other actors have poured into this project. I know it hasn’t been easy for you and I know every decision you’ve made was made with the best of intentions. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like what’s been done to my play— I feel like it’s been rewritten by someone who doesn’t understand it and directed by someone who doesn’t care.
[This is an email (lightly annotated) I wrote in the spring of 2006, my senior year of college. It is my final correspondence with a young woman whose NYC-based theater company was producing my first full-length play as their first full-length production. I had titled the play It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, but the company had changed the title (among, as I discovered, many many other changes) to Good Enough To Be True. I thought that the new title was good enough to be terrible, but at this point, we were long past that.]
I would be very grateful, energized, and excited to have a play produced off-off-Broadway [This was a not-so-subtle jab at the email I was replying to, which claimed I should be thrilled to have my play produced “off-Broadway.” I added an “off” in my response, but even the phrase “off-off-Broadway” conjures in the imagination a production more glamorous than what the show actually was— “off-off-9th-Avenue” might have been more appropriate], no matter how rough around the edges it was, but the simple fact of the matter is this is not my play. Lines have been mangled, characters have been changed, and entire scenes have been deleted. [This was all true, but my real complaint was not that scenes had been rearranged and deleted (although I did hate that), but that, unbeknownst to me, a new writer had been brought in to create large swatches of dialogue out of whole cloth, dialogue which to me sounded painful and forced, a crude approximation of the characters I had created.] The notes I gave [DIRECTOR’S NAME WITHHELD] three weeks ago and the notes I gave you two weeks ago were only the problems I thought could be changed easily given the time constraints you were under. They were a small portion of my dissatisfaction and disappointment with what this play has become. It is hard for me to swallow my pride and smile after witnessing something that has been so close to me for the last six months be torn apart and thrown back together. It is difficult for me to sit back and let you do your job as an actor, when I haven’t been allowed to do my job as a playwright.
[The last sentence is a direct response to a complaint from the previous email: “the playwright HAS TO be willing to let the actors make character choices and let the director have his/her vision. I didn’t appreciate your notes after our first run through on thursday before opening saying that our character choices were wrong, or that they would never do that, or whatever it was. We are actors, and if it’s in the script, we find justification for everything.” Perhaps I had been a bit prickly at that Thursday rehearsal, but my complaints were with the very script the actors had been trying to justify. A month after giving the company permission to make “some small changes,” I visited the city for a rehearsal and discovered the mess that had been created. That night I met with the director and we went through the entire script, page by page, addressing my concerns and reaching compromises. When I came back down the next weekend, none of the changes we agreed on had been made; she hadn’t even presented them to the actors. When the director left town a week before opening, I emailed the cast directly, pleading with them to recognize the holes and inconsistencies in the script and offering specific, detailed alternatives. The actors responded positively, but when I returned to the city for their final dress rehearsal I discovered again that my suggestions had been largely ignored.]
But you’re right: what’s happened happened and there’s no changing that now. If we knew then how things would turn out I think we all would have acted differently and I am certainly not without blame. [How very diplomatic.] I agree that all we can do is make the best of the current situation. I would have stayed after Saturday’s show and talked but the play got out a half hour later than I expected and I needed to get downtown in a hurry to perform with Olde English. I’m sorry if that came across as rude. However, I have taken the train down to the city every weekend and been to every performance possible and I’ve brought people with me to almost every one. [How selfless and noble.] I have been civil, polite, and courteous, even though I spend the majority of each show cringing, and I haven’t said anything disparaging about the play to any strangers or members of the press [How impossibly gracious.], so I don’t like being told that I’ve been unsupportive and ungrateful.
[In truth, the main reason I came to so many performances was so I could catch people I knew and warn them emphatically that this was not my play.It was a very complicated time for me, feelings-wise. I had recently broken up with [GIRLFRIEND’S NAME WITHHELD] and suddenly my weekends were empty. I had nowhere to go and no one to see. I would spend my days wandering around Manhattan, sitting in coffee shops, shuffling through museums, discovering the city for the first time by myself. Everything felt foreign, strange. The city as I knew it no longer existed and I felt, for the first time in a long time, like a tourist.
I also like how overwritten this email is. Clearly I had been writing a lot of college papers and was in the habit of using redundant synonyms to take up space— I had been civil, polite, AND courteous? I would be “grateful, energized and excited”? If this is what my play was like, no wonder they wanted to rewrite it.How precious to be over my own material is something I still struggle with. Art requires collaboration and trust, but it also requires a singularity of vision and a specificity of voice. There’s a thin line between a desire to please others (an impulse that separates art from masturbation) and the mistake of pleasing nobody by trying to please everybody. It’s the difference between being persistent and being stubborn, between working with others toward a shared goal and selling out your vision for the sake of getting things done. It’s a line I’m still exploring. I certainly didn’t have a handle on it five years ago.]
I would appreciate it if you would not send this script to [ACTOR’S NAME WITHHELD]’s agent, and I would have appreciated it if you’d asked me before submitting it to the Fringe festival. I will not be in New York City on Thursday, but if you’d like me to take part in some sort of talkback Friday night, Saturday night, or even Sunday afternoon, I will. The reason I didn’t want to participate was not some sort of screw-you gesture [although as an audience member, I find “talkbacks” after new plays boring and indulgent; they already sat through your play— let the audience go home already]; I was afraid that it might come up in conversation how displeased I am with the play and that would be embarrassing for all of us. I was afraid someone would ask, “What did you mean when you wrote this line?” and I would have to admit that I didn’t write that line and in fact I hate that line and think it’s nonsense.
[I’m slightly ashamed of the rush I get sending emails like this one (in the last five years, I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure several times). There’s a real thrill in being outraged, in all at once exposing the grudges I’d been quietly amassing with a controlled, civilized anger. The subtext here is I’m going to be the bigger man, but please don’t doubt that I hate you, that I will always hate you. (In truth, I’ve remained friends with many people I’ve sent emails like this to, including the recipient of this email, who is in fact a talented actress and a delightful human being.)]
I’d like to keep this professional, but in all honesty my feelings have been hurt. [That’s not a bad line, because it was true.] I trusted you with something that was very important to me and very close to me and I feel like that trust has been abused. I find the play redundant, self-satisfied, and messy [only now do I appreciate the pot-kettle-blackness of the phrase “redundant, self-satisfied, and messy,” an accusation which hilariously describes itself], but more to the point, it does not represent me as a playwright or say what I had wanted my play to say. [What had I wanted my play to say? Perhaps if I could have clearly articulated that, things wouldn’t have gotten this bad. All I knew was my play had a heart, a point, a real idea there, whatever it was, and Good Enough To Be True felt like a parody, alike in form, but not in content, missing some crucial something; it shared a skin with my work, but not its soul.] I feel like I’ve been betrayed and excluded by people whom I had considered my friends and now I’m being asked to celebrate the success of that betrayal. [That line, I admit, may be a little much.] I’m sorry if this seems like it’s coming out of nowhere or if it reads as unnecessarily harsh. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this and I’m sorry for bringing you down during what should be a very happy time for you. [I really was sorry. This experiment had been an unqualified failure for all parties. I had poured my heart into this project, but the actors had poured their money into it. And their hearts. And their money. And their parents’ money. This was the first and last production by the perhaps too adequately monikered [THEATER COMPANY’S NAME WITHHELD].] I hope your talkback goes well tomorrow night and I hope the remaining performances run smoothly.
-[EMBARRASSING COLLEGE NICKNAME WITHHELD]
[Later that spring, my school produced a version of the show as I had imagined it, now titled The long and short of it. (Yes, the lower-case letters and the period were part of the title; drink that in.) I loved the director, who I felt really got what I was trying to do, and all the actors were fantastic. I went to every rehearsal. Caroline told me that after seeing both versions, she really didn’t think they were all that different. That just about broke my heart.]
Every Saturday between Memorial Day and Labor Day I’m going to post a new sad song. So, you know, be aware.
When we moved in to the apartment in Washington Heights, one of the selling points was that it was just a half hour to 14th Street on the A train. I tested this once and it was true; it took me exactly thirty minutes. We almost never made it that far down though.
Sometimes we’d go down to the Upper West Side for brunch, or Harlem; even that was a trek. Mostly we stayed in Washington Heights. We had a great apartment and it was cozy and there was a beautiful park nearby and it was lovely and we were young and the city was huge and we had a fire escape and it was so romantic I can’t even tell you.
I remember once she took me to Union Square; it seemed so downtown and exotic to me. New York, as we understood it — as I understood it —existed solely above 14th street. I had no use for the L, or the Angelika, or Governor’s Island.
The first night, we went to a local bar to celebrate our first apartment together in the city. This is our bar, we said. We’ll come here all summer. We’ll be regulars.
After I moved to Brooklyn, everything changed, and I lived most of my life below 14th Street. All the really good brunch places were in Brooklyn anyway. I rarely went above midtown, and I really rarely went above the Upper West Side, and I never went back to the old apartment in Washington Heights.
In honor of my college’s five-year reunion, I stayed in and drank a few beers and watched Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s exquisite ode to the terrifying wasteland that is post-college life.
My fourth or fifth favorite favorite part of the movie (among many other favorite parts) is how it’s organized. Even though most of the characters have graduated, the film is divided by sections corresponding to the academic year — midterms, finals, Christmas break. For years after Bard, I mentally aligned my life along this grid, a phantom calendar to correspond with my phantom everything — impressions of conversations, a substitute routine, a ghost of a girlfriend made up of old love letters stuffed in a drawer.
When I think about college now it’s hard not to equate it with the sharp absence I felt after it ended. The year after I graduated was a particularly rough one for me. I didn’t live on campus like Baumbach’s characters, but I visited far too frequently, enough to realize that whatever there was there that I missed wasn’t there anymore. I lived in Brooklyn, in an unaffiliated sliver of a neighborhood between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights I affectionately (?) dubbed Nowheresville. My room was a glorified walk-in closet, although “glorified” might be too strong a word — you couldn’t open the door all the way without hitting the room-sized loft bed whose frame doubled as a coat rack.
We had cockroaches and mice. I once saw a junkie get arrested on my block. A couple kids stole my cell phone. I had a girlfriend for a little bit, but we didn’t really like each other all that much. We mostly just got along, which still puts her in the top half of Girls I’ve Dated. I mainly remember waiting outside her apartment in the dead of winter for the shuttle bus that replaces the L, and thinking, why am I doing this? I would see happy couples together and wish to myself that I had a girlfriend before remembering that I did in fact have one. Now she’s getting married. Today, in fact. I’m glad she found someone.
I was in the Greatest City In The World, working with my best friends on material I remain very proud of, but I was miserable. I was positive that whatever spark I had was slowly dulling, that life was a graph, trending away from all of that towards more of this. One day, I thought bitterly, I’ll look back at these years as the best of my life.
I made my girlfriend a list of all the things that made her happy and I sent it in the mail.
I didn’t know what to do because her birthday was coming up, but we were on a break. We were not talking— she had tried calling a few times, but I had told her not to call, that the point of a break is that you take a break. The plan was to meet up again at the beginning of the new semester to See How We Felt About Things.
I missed her. And I thought about her a lot.
So on a piece of college ruled binder paper I scrawled out the title “Things That Make You Happy” and I listed everything I could think of.
The reasons for the list were two-fold:
It would make her happy (?)
It would show her that all this time I had been paying attention. It would show her that I really cared about who she was and what made her happy even if I didn’t always act like it. The implication was, things that make you happy? Me. I can make you happy.
Looking back, I wonder if there’s ever been a wider disconnect between who a gift is ostensibly about and who it’s actually about.
I folded the list around a necklace and dropped the whole thing into an envelope. Always polite, my girlfriend replied with a thank you note: “Thank you for the necklace.”
In this song Paul Simon projects an entire relationship onto a trip from Michigan to New York. The “Kathy” mentioned in the song (and a few other Simon and Garfunkel songs) is real-life ex-girlfriend Kathy Chitty. “Let us be lovers,” he says at the beginning, and the song tracks their courtship from earnest to playful to not-exactly-hopeful: “‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping. ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.’”
I have a live recording of this song. Paul Simon is playing a huge concert in Central Park twenty-five years after he and Kathy broke up and when the audience hears the opening line they erupt in ecstatic applause. “Hurray!” they’re saying. “Tell us again about how Kathy’s love couldn’t fully satisfy you.”
A good deal of art is telling stories you’re not authorized to tell. I know I’ve hurt more than one girl who didn’t deserve it by writing about her in TMOPMO. My first year at Bard, my girlfriend came to visit me, and with pride I showed her all the plays I had written that semester. She was oddly (it seemed) unresponsive and it was only years later, when I went back and reread some of those old plays, that I realized they were all about her.
When I listen to these songs, I wonder about the Kathys and Cecilias and Emily whenever I may find hers, the Carrie Fishers and the Joe DiMaggios. How peculiar to know that somewhere out there someone you loved very much is singing a song about how you broke his heart, and someone else is applauding.
And then there was the time I put this song on a mix for a girl I liked. I put it as the first song, because I loved it and I couldn’t wait for this girl to love all the things I loved. Our love will be like Carolina, I thought, with shouting hills and splendid greens. An adventure— up, up, and away! This song was a promise, I thought. This song was what I wanted us to be.
It was years later, when my sister and I looked up the guitar chords and sang this song for a small group of family and friends, when I first really paid attention to the lyrics, and as I cheerfully sounded out the sentences, I realized for the first time that the song is entirely and unambiguously about domestic abuse.
Late Wednesday night, she called and asked if I wanted to go to Staten Island. And it wasn’t that cold and I wasn’t that tired, so I said yes. I had never been to Staten Island— in fact it was the one borough I hadn’t seen, and since I was leaving on Friday, it seemed as good a time as any.
The truth is, there’s not much to see in Staten Island, not after midnight anyway. The boat ride there is awfully romantic, but once you get there… well, there’s the elevator ride up to the top floor of the ferry building, and if you’re bored, you can take it back down again. You can try to figure out the subway situation and not get very far; you can run up the down escalator; you can step outside for a minute if the girl you’re with wants to smoke a cigarette.
They have a fish tank there and they have some reading material posted at the base of the fish tank about the fish tank and the logistics of the fish tank. It’s so heavy; the floor has to be supported with iron beams— it’s a big deal, this fish tank, a lot of work went into it, so you’d better appreciate it. We did this all for you, visitors to Staten Island.
And maybe if things were different, maybe if you weren’t moving to the other side of the country, you could come here again some time. Maybe this could become something special, something bigger than just a thing that you tried once because hey why not. But on the other hand, it’s probably best not to think about it too much. Just enjoy this for what it is. You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.
Sad Song Saturday: Kimya Dawson - Hold My Hand (download)
Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
(NOTE: This song about Kimya Dawson working at her parents’ day care is really super sad. Like it’s kind of not even fun-sad, it’s just sad-sad. If you like your sad songs to have a little pep to them, this might be more your speed.)
I had a girlfriend who was really into Kimya Dawson and I got really into Kimya Dawson too because I loved all the things my girlfriend loved. For the purposes of this blog entry, I’ll call my girlfriend, oh, Kimya Dawson.
Kimya Dawson would burn me mix CDs of Kimya Dawson music, the jewel cases lovingly hand decorated with glue and construction paper and her perfectly adorable handwriting spelling out every song title like a little valentine. When Kimya Dawson lived in San Francisco, the two of us went to see Kimya Dawson play live in her friend’s backyard, a potluck concert we found out about by reading Kimya’s livejournal. It was an intimate affair, friends playing songs on a hill in the moonlight, and I knew that this would always be an “us” thing. As wonderful an artist as Kimya Dawson was, I would never be able to share her with another girlfriend — I would never feel the joy of watching someone I loved discover her, the elation of transcribing the song titles in immaculate cursive, the rich pleasure of exposing this kind of wonderful to someone special the way Kimya Dawson had for me. This would end with us.
After my girlfriend and I broke up, everything reminded me of her. Sweaters. Ice cream. Other girls. Hearing my name out loud. Night time. And particularly Kimya Dawson.
I decided I had two options. I could never listen to Kimya Dawson again, or I could be like one of those guys who’s afraid of spiders and goes on a reality show where they lock up him in a box full of spiders and he screams and screams and screams and then somehow he’s not afraid of spiders anymore. Right? That’s how it works? Right? I put Kimya Dawson’s entire discography on a playlist and listened to it on repeat until I had spidered the arachnophobia out of me.
If I could go back I would tell myself not to worry about it. That the pain would go away by itself, all the vivid memories and associations — it would all fade in time. I look back now, what do I have? A handful of vague recollections, feelings I know more from describing than actually feeling, tracings over tracings over tracings of whatever I originally felt. I know I dated this girl for a few years and I know I was happy, but the specifics? You might as well ask me to describe a movie I saw once. I see flashes — a gesture, a look, a jacket that brought out the green in her spearmint eyes. But the heights, the despair, the weight, the profound effect on my life? Well, that’s all back there somewhere.
But of course I didn’t know all that at the time, so I forced the music upon myself. I forced new associations, new memories. I wanted to own the music exclusively. And a funny thing happened: it worked. The songs no longer reminded me of the happy times we shared. And then that was one less thing.
Sad Song Saturday: Sufjan Stevens - John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (download) (Submitted by Sarah K.)
Every Saturday in August, and a few Saturdays into September, I’m going to post a sad song and write a little something about it. I love sad songs. Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
Sarah says: Most of the time when I listen to Come On Feel the Illinoise I have to skip this track because it’s so heartbreaking that I have trouble being happy again for a little while after I hear it. When I heard it live for the first time, I cried like I was watching my favorite character die in a movie. it was so profoundly sad.
I say: This song will always remind me of the time I met up with my high school sweetheart in the park and she noticed my headphones and asked what I was listening to and I told her and she said, I like the part where he goes, Oh my Go-ee-o-ee-o-od.
I had called her on her birthday, because I don’t know, I guess I was bored, and she said, we should get together, catch up. And I don’t know, I guess I was bored, so I said yes.
At the time things were falling apart with my then-current girlfriend, around the two year mark, the same way things had with my high school sweetheart. There were the same tensions, the same fights — arguments that when they first start you can blame on the other person, but when they stretch across three relationships, you start to think, well maybe this really is my fault.
It was November in New York and the cool grays and browns of the park were reflected in my ex-girlfriend’s rich autumn-flavored eyes. She took me back to her apartment in Alphabet City and I peeked into her bedroom. The posters on the wall, the tiny dancers hanging from the ceiling — it was the same bedroom she had in college, the same one she had at home.
The next day my girlfriend and I broke up. I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t explain it now. Months later, after the dust had settled, I asked her what happened, and her only attempt at an explanation was: People don’t change, not really.
My high school girlfriend made me an omelet. She said, try this — you’re not going to like it; it has vegetables — but try it. I said, it’s good, and she couldn’t believe I liked something that wasn’t plain grilled cheese. She said, I swear to God you’re like a completely different person. And I smiled and I nodded and I wished that it was true.
I once dated a girl who would roll her eyes every time I told a joke and say, “You’re a comedian…” After we broke up, she started dating what I can only assume is a very serious man. I hear they’re vey happy.
“I think I know that guy,” I said, and Lacy said, “That’s unfortunate.”
After circling him a few times, pretending to be interested in a John Updike or a Frank McCourt or whoever else was on the These Guys Just Died! Table, I finally worked up the nerve and said, “Peter?” He didn’t recognize me.
I reminded him I used to babysit his boys, four summers ago. I used to take the subway with Jacob to drop him off at horseback riding camp and spent the afternoons with little Jan, who now must be twice the age he was when I knew him.
That was my first summer in New York, when I lived in Washington Heights with my girlfriend and two other girls.
“Tuesday nights will be pie nights,” one of them decided early on, and another one quickly chimed in, “Yes, every Tuesday night we’ll make a different pie, and we’ll have people over and every Tuesday night will be pie night!”
And I said, “Yeah, and we could make cakes too!” And they all looked at me, and one of them said, “No, Raizin. Pies.”
And I said, “Okay, but maybe one time, to switch it up, we could make a cake. Like maybe a cheesecake, with a crust; that’s kind of like a pie.”
And they said, “Raizin. Tuesday night is pie night. If you want to make a cake, you can do it some other night. Tuesday night’s for pies.”
The whole summer was kind of gross.
It was hot and sticky, as I’ve come to know New York summers to be, and I was living in the city, working odd jobs, and it felt like adulthood was staring at me down the barrel of a shotgun. This was the summer of my 21st birthday, the birthday that ruined birthdays for me for the next couple years because they all reminded me of my 21st, the last purely happy memory I had of my ex-girlfriend.
But for several hours a day, I got to be a kid with the Schwartz boys. We watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and drew pictures of spaceships and went to the park and got on our hands and knees and looked at bugs. They were little kids and so was I.
I asked Peter if Jacob was still horseback riding, and Peter said no. “He got too sad saying goodbye to the horses at the end of every summer. He said he couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Peter said, “You should come visit; the boys would love to see you.” And I thought, I’m sure they don’t remember me, but I said, “Yeah, I’ll come by sometime.”
He pulled out his iPhone and showed me some pictures. The boys at Tae Kwan Do class. They’d gotten so big, it took my breath away. I couldn’t believe how old they looked. I couldn’t believe how long Jacob’s hair had gotten.
I took her to see a romantic comedy, because isn’t that the point of being in a relationship? (Spoiler alert: No.) She was against the idea, probably because it seemed so couple-y, so comfortable, as if after the movie was over, I would tell her I loved her and we would go home and just like look into each other’s eyes for like an hour.
“Everyone there is going to think I made you go, because I’m the girl,” she said, and I knew she was really worried about what these strangers would think of her. If she could, she would have worn a big sign that said, “HE wanted to see this,” like how when I was a kid, my mom wanted to pin a piece of paper to my shirt that said, “I pick my own clothes! My mother doesn’t dress me like this!”
And so we went incognito. She wore a trench coat and sunglasses. I wore a black ski mask. I met her a block away from the theater and we bought our tickets separately. When we sat next to each other, we made a big show of meeting for the first time, lest anyone watching think we were together. “OH, EXCUSE ME, DO YOU MIND IF I SIT HERE?” “SURE, WHY NOT, IT’S A FREE COUNTRY.”
The whole charade was cute, it was fun. It was thrilling and romantic, like we were robbing a bank, or, you know, in a relationship.
The movie itself was charming and stupid. The boy realized that he was in love with the wrong girl all along. The girl finally learned to not be afraid of her feelings. As the credits rolled, I stood up and said loudly, “Hey, that actually wasn’t bad. Thanks for making me go, Andrea!” She turned bright red.
A few weeks later, we weren’t talking. I haven’t seen her in over a year. I’ll probably never see her again. I used to wish I would bump into her on the street, just so I could tell her how much she hurt me, how over it I was but how I wanted her to promise she would never do what she did to me to the next guy she dates, I would tell her that just because she’s been fucked over, that doesn’t give her the right to be fucked up. Then she would tell me all the things that were wrong with me, how I smothered her, how I was a bummer to be around, how I expected too much of her, and we would fight like that, shouting back and forth in the middle of the street. I used to wish that.
Now, I don’t think about her that much. Sometimes there are moments; I start to say, “I wonder…” but then I trail off. Our relationship was a scab that’s been pretty thoroughly healed over. Just another thing that happened in a long series of things that happened.
Still though, that thing I said at the movie theater? That was a pretty good joke.
I think “I like you just the way you are,” is pretty much the best compliment there is, if you mean it, and I wish I both said and heard it more in my life. It is so wonderful, the simple acknowledgment that You Are Special And You Have Worth.
Sometimes I think about all the things that are wrong with me. This will happen right after a break-up, or when I’m afraid someone won’t email me back, or during a lonely night at home, or during a lonely night at a bar, or a lonely night among friends and loved ones, or when I see people I know on TV, or right before I fall asleep, or right when I wake up, or if I’m bored while waiting in line at the Jamba Juice.
I think: Why was I such a selfish boyfriend? Or: Why don’t I exercise more, or eat better? Why don’t I apply to grad school, or learn how to drive? Or more to the point: What am I doing in life? Where am I going? I think: This is it. This is how it will be for the rest of my life. I will never not be alone, because I have nothing to offer.
What horrible trick did I play on all my ex-girlfriends to convince them I was worthy of their affection?
At some point I realized these thoughts were Not Helpful, so I wrote myself a note and folded it up and put it in my wallet. The idea was that whenever I was feeling low, I could pull it out and make myself feel better, but the truth is I don’t take it out all that often. Maybe just knowing it’s there is enough. Maybe I never really needed it all.
In any case, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s true, and I hope you believe me when I say that it’s true for you as well. This is what it says:
![Dear [ACTRESS’S NAME WITHHELD],
I certainly appreciate all the time, money, and energy you and the other actors have poured into this project. I know it hasn’t been easy for you and I know every decision you’ve made was made with the best of intentions. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like what’s been done to my play— I feel like it’s been rewritten by someone who doesn’t understand it and directed by someone who doesn’t care.
[This is an email (lightly annotated) I wrote in the spring of 2006, my senior year of college. It is my final correspondence with a young woman whose NYC-based theater company was producing my first full-length play as their first full-length production. I had titled the play It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This, but the company had changed the title (among, as I discovered, many many other changes) to Good Enough To Be True. I thought that the new title was good enough to be terrible, but at this point, we were long past that.]
I would be very grateful, energized, and excited to have a play produced off-off-Broadway [This was a not-so-subtle jab at the email I was replying to, which claimed I should be thrilled to have my play produced “off-Broadway.” I added an “off” in my response, but even the phrase “off-off-Broadway” conjures in the imagination a production more glamorous than what the show actually was— “off-off-9th-Avenue” might have been more appropriate], no matter how rough around the edges it was, but the simple fact of the matter is this is not my play. Lines have been mangled, characters have been changed, and entire scenes have been deleted. [This was all true, but my real complaint was not that scenes had been rearranged and deleted (although I did hate that), but that, unbeknownst to me, a new writer had been brought in to create large swatches of dialogue out of whole cloth, dialogue which to me sounded painful and forced, a crude approximation of the characters I had created.] The notes I gave [DIRECTOR’S NAME WITHHELD] three weeks ago and the notes I gave you two weeks ago were only the problems I thought could be changed easily given the time constraints you were under. They were a small portion of my dissatisfaction and disappointment with what this play has become. It is hard for me to swallow my pride and smile after witnessing something that has been so close to me for the last six months be torn apart and thrown back together. It is difficult for me to sit back and let you do your job as an actor, when I haven’t been allowed to do my job as a playwright.
[The last sentence is a direct response to a complaint from the previous email: “the playwright HAS TO be willing to let the actors make character choices and let the director have his/her vision. I didn’t appreciate your notes after our first run through on thursday before opening saying that our character choices were wrong, or that they would never do that, or whatever it was. We are actors, and if it’s in the script, we find justification for everything.” Perhaps I had been a bit prickly at that Thursday rehearsal, but my complaints were with the very script the actors had been trying to justify. A month after giving the company permission to make “some small changes,” I visited the city for a rehearsal and discovered the mess that had been created. That night I met with the director and we went through the entire script, page by page, addressing my concerns and reaching compromises. When I came back down the next weekend, none of the changes we agreed on had been made; she hadn’t even presented them to the actors. When the director left town a week before opening, I emailed the cast directly, pleading with them to recognize the holes and inconsistencies in the script and offering specific, detailed alternatives. The actors responded positively, but when I returned to the city for their final dress rehearsal I discovered again that my suggestions had been largely ignored.]
But you’re right: what’s happened happened and there’s no changing that now. If we knew then how things would turn out I think we all would have acted differently and I am certainly not without blame. [How very diplomatic.] I agree that all we can do is make the best of the current situation. I would have stayed after Saturday’s show and talked but the play got out a half hour later than I expected and I needed to get downtown in a hurry to perform with Olde English. I’m sorry if that came across as rude. However, I have taken the train down to the city every weekend and been to every performance possible and I’ve brought people with me to almost every one. [How selfless and noble.] I have been civil, polite, and courteous, even though I spend the majority of each show cringing, and I haven’t said anything disparaging about the play to any strangers or members of the press [How impossibly gracious.], so I don’t like being told that I’ve been unsupportive and ungrateful.
[In truth, the main reason I came to so many performances was so I could catch people I knew and warn them emphatically that this was not my play. It was a very complicated time for me, feelings-wise. I had recently broken up with [GIRLFRIEND’S NAME WITHHELD] and suddenly my weekends were empty. I had nowhere to go and no one to see. I would spend my days wandering around Manhattan, sitting in coffee shops, shuffling through museums, discovering the city for the first time by myself. Everything felt foreign, strange. The city as I knew it no longer existed and I felt, for the first time in a long time, like a tourist.
I also like how overwritten this email is. Clearly I had been writing a lot of college papers and was in the habit of using redundant synonyms to take up space— I had been civil, polite, AND courteous? I would be “grateful, energized and excited”? If this is what my play was like, no wonder they wanted to rewrite it. How precious to be over my own material is something I still struggle with. Art requires collaboration and trust, but it also requires a singularity of vision and a specificity of voice. There’s a thin line between a desire to please others (an impulse that separates art from masturbation) and the mistake of pleasing nobody by trying to please everybody. It’s the difference between being persistent and being stubborn, between working with others toward a shared goal and selling out your vision for the sake of getting things done. It’s a line I’m still exploring. I certainly didn’t have a handle on it five years ago.]
I would appreciate it if you would not send this script to [ACTOR’S NAME WITHHELD]’s agent, and I would have appreciated it if you’d asked me before submitting it to the Fringe festival. I will not be in New York City on Thursday, but if you’d like me to take part in some sort of talkback Friday night, Saturday night, or even Sunday afternoon, I will. The reason I didn’t want to participate was not some sort of screw-you gesture [although as an audience member, I find “talkbacks” after new plays boring and indulgent; they already sat through your play— let the audience go home already]; I was afraid that it might come up in conversation how displeased I am with the play and that would be embarrassing for all of us. I was afraid someone would ask, “What did you mean when you wrote this line?” and I would have to admit that I didn’t write that line and in fact I hate that line and think it’s nonsense.
[I’m slightly ashamed of the rush I get sending emails like this one (in the last five years, I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure several times). There’s a real thrill in being outraged, in all at once exposing the grudges I’d been quietly amassing with a controlled, civilized anger. The subtext here is I’m going to be the bigger man, but please don’t doubt that I hate you, that I will always hate you. (In truth, I’ve remained friends with many people I’ve sent emails like this to, including the recipient of this email, who is in fact a talented actress and a delightful human being.)]
I’d like to keep this professional, but in all honesty my feelings have been hurt. [That’s not a bad line, because it was true.] I trusted you with something that was very important to me and very close to me and I feel like that trust has been abused. I find the play redundant, self-satisfied, and messy [only now do I appreciate the pot-kettle-blackness of the phrase “redundant, self-satisfied, and messy,” an accusation which hilariously describes itself], but more to the point, it does not represent me as a playwright or say what I had wanted my play to say. [What had I wanted my play to say? Perhaps if I could have clearly articulated that, things wouldn’t have gotten this bad. All I knew was my play had a heart, a point, a real idea there, whatever it was, and Good Enough To Be True felt like a parody, alike in form, but not in content, missing some crucial something; it shared a skin with my work, but not its soul.] I feel like I’ve been betrayed and excluded by people whom I had considered my friends and now I’m being asked to celebrate the success of that betrayal. [That line, I admit, may be a little much.] I’m sorry if this seems like it’s coming out of nowhere or if it reads as unnecessarily harsh. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this and I’m sorry for bringing you down during what should be a very happy time for you. [I really was sorry. This experiment had been an unqualified failure for all parties. I had poured my heart into this project, but the actors had poured their money into it. And their hearts. And their money. And their parents’ money. This was the first and last production by the perhaps too adequately monikered [THEATER COMPANY’S NAME WITHHELD].] I hope your talkback goes well tomorrow night and I hope the remaining performances run smoothly.
-[EMBARRASSING COLLEGE NICKNAME WITHHELD]
[Later that spring, my school produced a version of the show as I had imagined it, now titled The long and short of it. (Yes, the lower-case letters and the period were part of the title; drink that in.) I loved the director, who I felt really got what I was trying to do, and all the actors were fantastic. I went to every rehearsal. Caroline told me that after seeing both versions, she really didn’t think they were all that different. That just about broke my heart.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lstgl3tafs1qzt0gko1_1280.jpg)
