“‘Right up until the last minute Doc thought I was going to go with him.  Even though I kept telling him: But, Doc, I’m not fourteen any more, and I’m not Lulamae.  But the terrible part is (and I realized this while we were standing there) I am.  I’m still stealing turkey eggs and running through the brier patch.  Only now I call it having the mean reds…Never love a wild thing…That was Doc’s mistake.  He was always lugging home wild things.  A hawk with a hurt wing.  One time it was full-grown bobcat with a broken leg.  But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get.  Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods.  Or fly into a tree.  Then a taller tree.  Then the sky.  That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell.  If you let yourself love a wild thing.  You’ll end up looking at the sky.'”

Reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s felt like attending a Liza Minnelli concert.  I knew the voice, the presence, but it just wasn’t right.  It’s not right because I saw Judy Garland first.  Or in this case, the film adaptation.  (Yes, I realize the chronology of my metaphor is questionable.  Bugger off.)  I kept seeing Audrey Hepburn while I was reading, knowing she was the only possible casting choice, the only woman alive who was capable of bestowing Holly with some believability, but…not entirely, because Holly is only a concept, even to herself.  I kept inserting the film’s forced romance, standby glamour and changed ending which were not real, were created by Blake Edwards, Henry Mancini and George Axelrod so we could handle it, so we wouldn’t cry, at least not in the way they didn’t want us to.

And yet I can’t blame them.  I feel differently about this novel to film adaptation than any other.  They are two different languages, but they can be spoken and comprehended simultaneously without a translator.

Because Holly is bigger than Truman Capote or Audrey Hepburn.  She is a universe, and any observations provided, no matter how misconstrued or dim-witted, must be accepted.  They must be accepted so we can imagine getting closer to her.  So, like Doc, we can pretend she never ran away.

Saying you have no regrets is one of those brazenly bullshitty statements that requires Pretenders-like brass to pull off.  Unless it’s spoken by an elderly person (we’re talking 70 and up), because no one questions them.  Even then, only the worshipping and ignorant believe it.  Everyone else realizes that people who say they have no regrets have a massive case of denial.  Or they have no consciences.

Who wants that?

I don’t.  And from what I know of you, you don’t.

So we’re not going to do that.  Especially not when I’m turning 22 in just a little while.  I suppose a purging session of sins committed would be the most logical response to the above tirade, but no one wants to read that, and I don’t want to write it, and neither one of us wants to remember.  But this is tiresome.  I’ve spent too much time telling myself what I want and you what you want.  That has always been my hangup.

You should know that I’m not relating unless I’m entertaining, or at least offending.  I have a hard time telling you the truth unless I feel superior in some way.  I craft my responses.  I fake my reactions.  I disagree to be different.  I listen for the wrong reasons.  I emulate my favorite novels, films, eras, songs – these are the casts I wear so you can’t see the injuries, only the concept of them.  And when you sign them, I’m sort of happy, but not really, because you’re endorsing the idea, not the injury.  If I took them off, I’d be another battered woman in a Lifetime movie.  Worse yet, I wouldn’t be covered with adoring autographs.

And when I hear I’ve achieved the desired effect – “You remind me of Zooey and the narrator from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” I scream inside and smile outside.

Create.  Cry.  Repeat.

It sounds like a purging session, doesn’t it?  It really isn’t.  It’s just that I’m 22 (it’s been a little while already, doesn’t time soar?) and nobody knows who I am.  Including me.  Here’s where it gets just horrible: I don’t care.  I can’t, because I don’t know any other way.  The casts are my limbs, the injuries don’t exist.  I refuse it, it cannot be.  It was not there to begin with.  It is nothing but a literary device coerced into life by an upper-middle class midwestern twenty-something with no struggles, aspirations…or regrets.

I remember it was the same week that those black kids threw eggs at me and the weather finally made up its mind to stay good and cold.  I stuck my bare feet in some white tennis shoes and threw a black leather coat over my v-neck undershirt.  Then I started walking.  I had set out to buy some food, but the only places open were the “all Spanish food all the time” stores and I was just so exhausted with refried beans.  I drew a cigarette and tapped it delicately on the front of the pack like every respectable ‘50’s businessman and I realized that I was smoking Marlboro Lights when I wanted Camels, I was living on Staten Island when I wanted to live in Manhattan and I was systematically viewing NYPL’s entire video collection when I wanted a job.

They always come in threes, the fuckers.

I have a laissez-faire approach to my own life.  He created it, so I expect Him to do something with it.  An honorable term for this would be faith.  An honest one would be inactivity.

Nothing else for tonight.  There were two full-length mirrors resting against a battered fence and I looked into them.  It was a boring portrait.  Too much hair, not enough meat on his bones.  Too sullenly experienced, too sunnily naïve.

Paradoxes aren’t marketable.  No wonder I’m not employed.

But those are important things.  What was bothering me was the un ones.  For instance: I had forgotten to wear a belt with my khakis and I looked like Dick Van Dyke in the penguin scene from Mary Poppins.  My mail was arriving everyday with everyone else’s in a community pile in the foyer of the apartment building.  I was out of ProActiv and I was beginning to look like a pubescent Richard Burton.

It got really bad as I scooped a big spoonful of sweet potatoes onto my plate.  It’s when I realized I was eating someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner, because we never have sweet potatoes at ours.  Why would we?  We have regular potatoes, we don’t need sweet ones too.  But I ate them anyway, and liked them, which made it weirder.  When I called my family, they seemed preoccupied with the party.  My cousin asked why I didn’t have a job yet.

“I haven’t found something I like.  I want to work at something that I enjoy.”

“Well why don’t you get something until then?”

He wasn’t listening.  I’m glad my mind was still on the sweet potatoes because if it had been on the present conversation I would have said, “Then the ‘something’ becomes your job for the next ten years.  Like you.”

I’d been racking up enough bitch points, though, so it’s probably best I avoided that one.  I’d been behaving like a mutated Mankiewicz monster, insulting my roommate’s entire family one at a time, without (or with) their awareness.  It could be because I hated them (for insipidly inflated reasons, one being that they didn’t notice my James Taylor record playing pleasantly during dinner), but I think it was really because I hated me – for making my ostentatiousness seem ‘outgoing,’ my cruelty ‘clever,’ and making everyone like me despite my hideousness.  It made me want to knock over tables and scream “falsity!” and slap everyone in the room and just weep.

But I didn’t weep then.  I wept alone, when I watched The Court Jester with Danny Kaye.  He’s this crackpot comedian, letting himself be used so others are amused.  But it’s this one line that just killed me, because Kaye says it with such gusto grief: “He lives for a sigh, he dies for a kiss, he lusts for the laugh, ha! He never walks when he can leap! He never flees when he can fight …And I offer myself to you, all of me. My heart. My lips. My legs. My calves. Do what you will – my love endures. Beat me. Kick me. I am yours.”

“You know that one piece you wrote? You know?”

You’re mumbling a little now; you’re a little hazy, I’m sure of it.  Even though I can’t see your eyes in the darkened car with flashing lights and clicking whatzits that always makes me feel like the kid in Flight Of The Navigator.  But I know you are, because you haven’t eaten anything today but a bowl of Lucky Charms.  You could have told me that before I mixed the screwdrivers.  But then we wouldn’t have wobbled over my collage of ‘60’s and ‘70’s advertisements, cackling and screeching like steroid-induced parrots.  We wouldn’t have debated Andy Warhol’s significant irrelevance.  We wouldn’t have reached our feverish telepathy and flagrant adoration.  Not that we needed vodka to get there, we just needed it to get there faster.

Anyways, as absurd as it may sound, I really need those things, Tim.  They’re so on, they’re so us, they’re so eerily right, and I’ve been missing them for so long, my God, so long and I just can’t be away from you anymore, and…

“Why are you smiling?  You know what piece I mean – the one about your father”

Of course I know what one.  I know what one.

“Yes – what about it?”

“Can I – I don’t know, would you let me – could – I set it to – music?”

“I smile the kind of smile that’s so big it sends the little true tears out.  But it’s dark in the car, and I can send them back, so I do.  You’ve always been like this magnanimous hot tub for my soul.  I just slide into this unshakeable warmth around you.  God, it feels so hyper-heightening and numbing, like only intense heat can be.

“I would love that, Tim.  I think that’s probably the most lovely thing anyone’s ever said to me.”  I say something about us being Brick and Skipper but without the Tennessee Williams stilted poetry passing as lines and the latent homosexuality and you’re smiling, you bastard.  How can anyone with any sanity or literary knowledge agree with a statement like that?  Yet you do, of course you do.  Because we’re here and we’re the same and how could I forget how essential it all is…how can we be expected to be rational or human unless we’re near one another?  How can anyone approach friendship like this?

Time’s flying by like manic geese who’ve ditched the V altogether.  We’re at Pizzeria Uno now and talking like Hispanics with eight cups of coffee in them and you’re telling me you wish the Biblical practice of kissing your best guy friend could be reinstated because you’d do it right now, because that’s just how David and Jonathan we are.  And It’s so odd and sincere and makes me wonder if Tennessee Williams had a hand in writing the Bible.

But it slows down finally, which is a small relief, because we haven’t stopped connecting the whole evening.  The icy mistress of reality has slipped in the car and is sitting between us, trying to pry apart the superglue of joyous friendship.  We will not see each other for possibly longer this time.  Possibly longer than ever.  I hate that the mistress continues sitting there, just intruding like that babblesome woman who comes in at the end of Brief Encounter and won’t let Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard just talk, for God’s sake, and say what they need to say.  But we’ve reached the last line and it’s better to blurt it out than realize that the show will never happen again with the same people, the same electricity.  It’ll become summer stock through lame phone calls and limp e-mails.  I hope I’m stronger this time and don’t forget.  I hope you never do either.

Now we stand in the hallway of your dorm and I fiddle with the doorknob and mutter about how we deserve way better than this.  Suddenly you’re reaching out to hug me and it’s so surprising because we never have, really, before.  All the clucks and knuckleheads I’ve hugged and never the one that matters so much.  Of course we’re bad at it, fourth-grade-play PDA bad, but it’s more real that way.  It’s not a kiss but it’s pretty damn close.

It does this specifically to bother me, I’m sure of it.  The dusk autumnal splashes of incarnadine light that make me drive twenty miles over the speed limit to get to my camera, and then disappear, forcing me to placate/enrage myself with the trite reassurance that it was enough to see it.  It’s the time of year when every house looks like the one Jamie Lee Curtis is babysitting at in Halloween. It’s the time of year when you can wear sweaters, praise be to God, and feel the air enliven your body like alka seltzer in a glass of water.  It’s the time of year when someone plays Creed’s “Higher” at full volume in a parking lot and still all you can do is grin because it’s so unbelievably perfect outside.  It’s like nature has been working on itself all year, having its fair share of failures and successes and then autumn rolls around and it gets it right, dammit, and it knows it.  Never mind the fact that it has to learn this every year, none of us care, at least I don’t, because it means I can ride the moped wearing my gay ’70s tennis player shirt, dirt-brown pants with squiggles on the back pockets and pointed leather shoes and look unnaproachably glamorous. 

But I’ve always turned heads in this town. 

I’m Jonah’s whale in a mucky puddle.  It’s never been enough before, but now that I’m leaving, it seems like it could be.  Especially after the weather change; it’s like it’s pleading for a second chance.  “You can make it here,” it says desperately, enthusiastically, displaying all of its peacock feathers of possibility.  “Think of how much you’ll stand out – think of how little you’ll have to do – think of how much money you’ll save.”  But I don’t listen to it.  I turn up the music in my head and I think of how mind-blowingly beautiful Central Park in the fall will be.  It has to be this way.  I don’t think I’ll make much of myself, truthfully.  But I know it’ll be more than here.

You and I were
Born like the breaking day
All our seasons
All our green Septembers
Burn away
Slowly we’ll fade into
A sea of midnight blue
And a falling crescent noon

Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo.

The most remarkable thing about animals is how they have just enough similarities to humans to be familiar and just enough differences to be novel, thus maximizing the amusement level.  Examples to follow.

Today’s Zoological Highlights

Two Ostriches – Presumably man and wife, having the appearance of unskilled over-the-hill ballet dancers picking through their neighbor’s trash and checking occasionally for people, oncoming vehicles, or worse yet, the garbage men.

Some Stingrays – Like velvet-robed socialites fresh from a downpour, they flirtingly flittered by us as though we were randy millionaires who could buy them as many drinks as they wanted.

White-mantled Tamarin – A curious and rather cocky individual who vaguely resembled David Bowie in Labyrinth, minus the leather pants (a decided relief).

Two male Peacocks – A distance away from their ostensible wives, one’s plumes had been completely removed.  Mother speculated his mate stole them and made a hat.  I suggested that she ordered he remove them and stop coming on to other girls.  We agreed both were possibilities.

I do believe it’s true.

I think Coldplay is the only band that deserves the moon as a venue.  Especially on a night like tonight, when it comes in through the windows and the trees like a spontaneous spotlight looking for entangled lovers.  Instead it finds me, alone in the living room, the last one up, just finishing Manhattan Melodrama and a little teary-eyed, not because it is finely-crafted tragedy but because there are no actors like William Powell and Myrna Loy anymore.  So I go to my bedroom and turn on the light, which flickers like ADD SOS, and on the flashes I develop a plan, which begins by locating the strawberry cigarillos and the queerly pink lighter.  I will give that moon the audience it desires.  I decide to take the Subaru instead of the Toyota (much more rugged, of course) and try to wheedle the garage door into sliding up serenely – it responds by clanging louder than before.  “Did you go somewhere at eleven last night?”  “Yes, mother, I did.”  “I thought I heard the garage go up at eleven.”  “Well that would be because you did.”  And I drive right out into the middle of the field like it’s a Catholic church carnival.

It is no less than lovely.  It looks like one of those day-for-night scenes in the 50’s version of South Pacific where the moonlight is so blue yet so bright that you know it can’t be real.  Except that it is real this time around and it makes me want to call every member of that cast and crew who’s still alive and tell them to haul their asses to East Troy, Wisconsin to see this moon that looks like that scene.  If I could I wouldn’t.  I light the cigarillo, which seems redundant since it’s such a brisk night that I can see my breath anyway, and the 2001-ish notes of “Square One” ascend my eardrums, in a moment brought to you by iPod.  I climb onto the roof of the Subaru with sandals made wet and squeaky by the evening and watch.

Immediately it’s enough to be watching, as it always is, because God made this.  And he made Chris Martin to sing about this.  And even if He’s just made me for this moment – if that’s all I’m ever good for, or a part of – that’s all right.  I’m glad He thought of me when He created this moment.

Like a crazed Columbus, I have claimed my grandparents’ house as my own.  I approach it daily with an acrid fondness; the kind of attitude that lifetime employees of Wal-Mart and World War II veterans wear so flatteringly.  The subtle stashes of liquor, the scandalously gaudy jewelry, the painstakingly preserved vintage clothing, the unsuccessful combination of traditional and modern furniture – I see them as monuments in a great but fallen culture that I am now reigning over.  I have been elected to dismantle them, slowly, with rueful respect.

But before I can give the proper eulogy, I am invaded.  My cousins swoop about the house, ransacking the pearly purses, cancelled checks and wind-up injun.  They look with an abominating superiority at the vintage, squawking, “ick, what is this?”  They pull out my grandfather’s diapers and cackle and mimic.  One of them crassly totes a Mike’s Hard Lemonade she found in the basement refrigerator and saturates every inch of her overtanned, overexposed skin with grandmother’s signature perfume.  They are the Marx Brothers entering an Ingmar Bergman film, and I cannot forgive them for it, even though I hate Ingmar Bergman.  I hate her skin even more.  I hate their nonexistent taste.  I hate that they think it’s a merry old day at the fair, instead of a couple’s memories resurrected like pink perennials, sprouting spontaneously from dresser drawers, closets and pictures.  I cannot forgive them for shitting on my monuments like the peon pigeons they are.

I fully realize this now, as I sit at home in the kitchen.  “I’m sorry if I sound possessive or petty, but I just have come to think of that house as my domain.  As my space,” I start abstractedly, bewilderedly, watching my mother get a glass of water.  “I mean, I saw them pawing through everything, and I just wanted to scream ‘how dare you,’” I continue, now in a raspy whisper, “that was all she had.  Her clothes and her jewelry.  That was all she had,” my voice gives out and I stare at my chicken sloppy joe with waterlogged eyes.  I take a bite and swallow, which goes down like a lead bowling ball.  I reach for my napkin, trembling.  I cannot look up.  I am too infuriated.  “I’ve come to know her.  I mean, I finally know her.  And more than anyone does right now.  I’ve looked through her life, and I think I finally know who she is.  I think we finally understand one another.  And they –” but I cannot continue.  I am weeping for the monuments now, the sad, silly monuments that I have so reverently tried to lay to rest.  It doesn’t matter.  I reach for my mother’s hand and we shake and cry and shake and cry.  “She never let anyone in,” my mother says, the regret of a lifetime throttling her voice, “and you’ve gotten to see her.  You’ve gotten to know her.  I’m so glad,” she finishes, looking at something brighter and further away.  I hold her hand tighter and try to look there too.

Preserve your memories; they’re all that’s left you.

Hangers and hangers of clothing that’s been worn once, a dozen times, a hundred times, however many times.  A hidden bottle of Brandy here, a hidden bottle of Brandy there.  Photo album after photo album.  And heels, by God, heels.  I pull it all out of the closets like unwilling wisdom teeth, stuffing it into oversized black bags that look as though they held corpses in a previous life.  Now they hold my grandparents.  Or at least the articles that defined my grandparents.  Oh, my grandfather’s not dead, but his mind is – and that’s all people have ever been to me anyway – minds encased by fleshy overcoats.

Then all of the bags get stacked in the garage, as war veterans with blank graves.  I don’t sympathize with them, ruminate on them.  I don’t even give them eulogies.  I try to keep them as faceless as possible.  And I wipe my dusty death feet on the mat, and I come back in the house, and I sit in the woman’s leather chair in the corner, and I listen to some rollicking ’20’s music, and I feel further away, further away, then ever before.  And I try to see the room from her eyes, when one of us would enter the front door for a visit.  And I can’t understand how she could have enjoyed those visits at all.  I didn’t.  I couldn’t reach her chair from my dutiful spot on the couch.  I had to walk over to her.  I had to walk over to her.  And even as I was hugging her, she was in the corner.  As I kissed her on the forehead, she was in the corner.

But then I hear Helen Kane sing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and sneeze some dust and Brandy out of my nostrils.  I take a long-stemmed glass out of the cupboard and fill it with Cherry Cider instead of wine.  I survey the madness again.  And then, from somewhere in the back of my mind I picture my mother, walking out of the dementia unit, softly crying, saying, “It will be okay again.  It will never be the same, but it will be okay again.”