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May 11, 2008These are my humble offerings.Please be kind.MY, BUT GARAGE SAILINGis a lonely business when you’re holding the fort alone on the sidewalk with your scrawny reject belongings splayed before the general passing-by public for their scrutiny and judgments. I don’t want this—but do you? For a dollar? Fifty cents? A dime? As your own story is told by your things, people offer theirs as they pass a spring afternoon walking down Page Street. My friend Kendelyn, who came out from Berkeley to help me set up, is selling “mouse pads,” hand-stitched fabric catnip pillows, a sweet treat for kitty at only fifty cents apiece. We find out how many people have cats, had cats, have dogs, or no pets at all. We meet one lady whose cat does not care for catnip, thank you very much. But the dogs take great pleasure in sniffing it out. THESE THINGS,arranged on a colorful beach towel, are invested with my energy, with years of co-habitation with the one, the only Alexandra Jones, but it’s time for her to say goodbye to them. Take a piece of me—please. I have lain myself bare, naked on the street for all to see. These things adorned my home, resided in my closets and my drawers right next to my underwear. They are redolent with artistic DNA. I walked fifty miles in those shoes. Those hats enclosed my brain and kept my head stylishly warm or dry. Anything of value, whether handmade or antique or solid oak or sterling silver or of vintage design, suddenly, on a granite sidewalk, looks like the trashiest offering you should be ashamed to make. And to think I had advertised this as a no-junk garage sale. Actually, I’m doing fairly well—got rid of some heavy cumbersome stuff I will never again have to pick up and haul anywhere, and assorted tchochkes, the usual interesting little items that I found to be unique and well-crafted and with which I filled every nook and cranny of my house, and my soul. A friend wrote to say that when he was housesitting for me in Berkeley, he found that “the ambience of that house was wonderful in part because of the stuff stuffed in it, and also because the ’stuff’ seemed organically connected into an aesthetic whole, to me elusive but definitely present. I regarded it as (very good) art.” THE HOUSE OF TANTALUSThis friend was recently divorced and left his Berkeley home of 20+ years for the wilds of trailer life in Concordia. He knows the terrain; he said “the type of material cleanout you mention in your column is THE most difficult task I’ve undertaken over the last 10 years, and continues to be a major challenge to endurance of will.” He said if a Twilight Zone script were written about it, it would be called The House of Tantalus. THEY SAYthat among traumatic experiences, moving is second only to the death of a loved one. I wouldn’t go that far, but when whatever foundation you’d built your life on is rattled in a life-size quake, it’s more than unsettling, it’s a petit mort—a little death (actually a French expression for orgasm)—and a rebirth. The brown ankle boots I trod the streets of Portland with, just went to Desiree from around the corner on Steiner for fifty cents. Of supple leather and super comfortable, they really just need a good polish. I explain that since I let my hair go gray, I have ceased and desisted wearing brown. When I colored my hair a reddish brown (when I still didn’t look my age) I had a complete wardrobe of copper tones. Friends used to call me “Copper Penny” and one of them, Stefan Stefanarama (that’s his sideshow persona), made me a birthday card of 45 pennies. An architect, he also called me “Core-Ten.” I sent him a copper postcard from Hoover Dam. My palette was “autumn” then; I am now a “winter.” Now my closet looks like black and white television; I am often disconcerted by the mounds of black material coming out of my dryer, with perhaps one splash of red in there. So funereal. Hey, you’re not dead yet, gal. Lighten up! I make note that no one has commented on the utterly cool Beatific Soul Jack Kerouac On the Road t-shirt I got at the NY Public Library, with a yellow highway divider slicing diagonally through the words. I thought maybe I might meet a few fellow travelers. I’M ALSO SURPRISEDno one has shown interest in the funky curlicue menorah of twisted metal and crystal ornaments on its crystal base. Maybe it needs to stay with me. I got it at famed landscape architect Topher Delaney’s Buddha-oriented shop she once upon a time had on South Park. It was a freestyle establishment. Often no one would be minding the store. Items were mostly unpriced. Customers played the piano. When I bought the thing, it was covered in parrot shit from the birds flying around the place. The shit is still archeologically intact under the topcoat of congealed wax. One time I had an emergency need for a D. I collect letters and I wanted to spell out my name in disparate and funky typefaces for my housewarming party, and was lacking a D. I found an old protractor in a custom wooden casing that would fill the bill, and, as was typical, had no price on it. The store attendant said she’d have to check with the owner, but couldn’t reach her by phone and asked could I come back? I worked in the neighborhood, but I was desperate for the D, it was the only letter missing. I said, come on, it’s just a lousy protractor, I’ll give you twenty bucks for it, a most generous offer. She took it. I was overjoyed. I had my D! I’m going to keep the menorah, just as David from my building is eyeing it. I’m too invested in it. It looks like a candelabra out of Renoir’s “Beauty and the Beast.” I see myself in a white cotton nightgown and long trailing hair, carrying it down a winding staircase, casting spooky shadows against the walls of the old family manor my family doesn’t have. IT’S FREEZING OUT HEREin the windy shade, and my laptop battery is about to conk out, so I close up shop at 3:00. I did OK—$182.50 over 6 hours, averaging $30 an hour. Better than any job ever paid me—except when I did consulting software instruction—that was $60.00 an hour, but short-lived. I once made $300 on the high-traffic corner of Dwight Way and Curtis Street in Berkeley (from a sale, not from whoring), and flew to Reno on that money to visit my friend Larry at his A-frame house in Carnelian Bay on Lake Tahoe. But for my out-of-the-way shady little nook between two plane trees I am pleased. [They’re not really plane trees, and I don’t even know if they grow here. I just wanted a descriptor in there. Picked plane to accent “pleased.” God is in the details. – Ed.] Of course I quit all jobs symbolically when I left my last one to make zero dollars an hour as a writer. This isn’t work at all, however, as Ross Mirkarimi said of his supervisorial duties at his jampacked campaign kick-off at Yoshi’s. Talk about an ego trip—this one was enough to fly the guy to the moon and back. I’ve always called Ross Hotdog. It dates back to the ’04 campaign after a speech he made at Club Mighty and I grabbed him by the arm and said, “You’re the real thing, aren’t you, hotdog.” He guffawed “What a line!” So I tell him, at my turn in the reception line, “It’s official, Ross; you’re the hottest hotdog of all time.” Who will one day be Mayor. “I could eat you with mustard,” I add to myself, parenthetically. Anyway, writing is not work. It is joy. This column is my relaxation. My other projects are long-haul affairs. This I can just knock off. Lucky is he or she, a rare creature, who makes an honest living doing work he or she loves. But my day will come, God’s will be done. ACTUALLY,I was invited (I answered a Craig’s List ad) to submit samples to a newly forming California lifestyle magazine that wanted a San Francisco columnist. The editor said there would be some pay, but probably not much. “If you pay me a penny, it will be a penny more than I’ve ever made from writing.” The editor loved my column, but was hesitant about my samples, which were, frankly, “down on San Francisco” because all I had on my mind at the time was my situation in the context of the housing crisis. I didn’t have anything peppy or positive to say about the city I had formerly been in love with. It didn’t love me back, goddammit, and I was going to punish it by exiling myself to Brooklyn! THE SAMPLES WERE HARD,hard going for me because there was a 500-word limit, and I can barely say hello in 500 words. I’d start with a 1000-word draft and painfully, excruciatingly cut my own heart out, rendering myself flat and abrupt. Subject, verb, sentence. The bare bones of communication. I was very uncomfortable with that and with the mandate for positive themes. I am too, too used to writing whatever I want that perhaps I’ve been spoiled for life. I once bought a book on the strength of its title: I Write As I Please. Amazingly, it’s still on its shelf and I even know where. It turned out to be the recollections of a journalist, Walter Dubanty, during WWI and the Russian Revolution. I fall upon this vivid and startling passage about a firing squad execution:
The author described this phenomenon as being “the most interesting thing” about watching three men die. At the time he had regarded Bolsheviks as “enemies of God and man” and watched “without the least compunction or pity.” Whoa, fall back, dude! OK, off-topic but interesting. I THOUGHT AND THOUGHTabout the magazine column and decided that for the limited release area of the magazine, the word restrictions and upbeat style they were looking for, that the opportunity and whatever exposure and pay it might bring, were not appealing enough to butcher my own writing. Why am I trying to fit myself into this 500-word box, I’m thinking. I was terribly flattered by this first interest by any editor in possibly paying me for writing, but in a badly bungled email to her I told her I wasn’t interested, that I’m not the writer they are looking for. I was more or less thinking aloud, but writing it down, and it came off like an ego-maniacal manifesto. I WRITE AS I PLEASE! Truly, I’ve always been turned off by the idea of writing for money for someone who has the power to edit my writing because I am being paid to produce what they want. “I’m not big on compromise,” I told her. The sale of my flat allows me to be picky and choosy, as I do not need the gig to support my writing. If my rent and health insurance needed to be paid, I might feel differently about it, who knows? Anyway, for now, it’s me and The Ax Files, full steam ahead. An Australian reader cautioned me against putting too much of my artistic energy into this column. “If you’re anything like me,” she wrote, “you might be ingeniously procrastinating and siphoning off energy that could be used to hone a book into something really sharp and beautiful.” She makes a good point. But I have put my book projects on hold until I am comfortably ensconced in wherever my new home will be. This column keeps me going. I remember once kissing a soon-to-be-divorced man on the street outside the White Eagle in Portland and he told me, “Thanks, you’re really keeping me going.” Poor guy drank himself to death. SHOULD I KEEP GOING?Call 1-888-LOV-EYOU to vote yes; 1-888-SHU-TUP! to vote no. These are not 800 numbers. Standard text messaging rates apply. Well, I am siphoning off energy that could be used to resume packing my life away, but Kee-rist, I need a break from that madness. As I survey my denuded walls and empty bookshelves, I feel lighter and brighter, detoxified by the departure of things that have worn out their welcome. FUCK ME DEAD!I exclaim when I hear the soft, alarming alarm of a Microsoft Office notification. Oh, no, what did I forget? “14 minutes to Brahms” says the notice. FUCK! Engrossed in the execution story, I completely forget about the Brahms Festival at Davies, with an early 7:00 pre-concert performance of the Clarinet Trio in Am. I untangle my legs on the couch and leap into the closet to perform a quick-change of my Jack Kerouac t-shirt for a black turtleneck to go with my black jeans, for I am front and center in Seat A106. This will have to do. I haven’t dashed out of a house so fast since Halloween, grabbing a fistful of change for the bus and hightailing it down the stairs. As I am going out the door, my gabby 92-year-old angel of a neighbor, Iris, is coming in. I hesitate but exclaim, “No time to chat, dear, must run!” and I hear her customary chuckle behind me as I fly down the street. The concert starts in ten minutes and I sprint to Haight and Fillmore to find that the 6 Parnassus is due…in ten minutes. With my wallet stuffed with bills from the sale, I contemplate flagging down a cab and yelling, “DAVIES HALL! AND STEP ON IT!” But I’m going to miss the performance no matter how I spin it, so I gather myself and practice some calming breathing. In my reverie, I neglect to get off at my stop at Van Ness, and the bus drops me off at 9th and Market. It doesn’t really matter, I’ll walk up Grove instead, but I still feel rushed. I try to stop myself from thinking (think good thoughts, and all that) “Get Out of My Way” about the slow-footed patrons ambling toward the hall. WOMAN, CALM DOWN!As I climb the stairs I could swear I hear Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture coming out the TV monitor. Huh? Whatever. In my still agitated state, I now have a half hour to kill before the performance proper. But of course I fled the house without writing implements and the column is still unwinding in my head. At the symphony store, I ask the clerk, “Do you happen to sell pens? I have nothing to write with.” Now, had it been my own self, I would have just given my own self an “office” pen and said, “Knock yourself out.” Her eyes drop to the plain stick pen on the glass display case, but she points to a shelf behind me. “Oh, OK” I say, “only expensive ones. Oh well, I’m supporting the orchestra!” It costs me ten bucks plus change to buy the silver-toned San Francisco Symphony pen with which I write these words, standing at one of the tall round tables for drinks by the rails along the windows. “Do you want a bag?” “Yes, the biggest one you have. I have nothing to write on.” Sensing my desperation, she says sympathetically, “Here’s your receipt. You can write on that too.” I’M STILL SPILLING MY ENERGYinto these words, but now I have Brahms to look forward to, courtesy soloist Leif Ove Andsnes. I haven’t heard the second Piano Concerto in the several years I have not gotten my turntable repaired, and I won’t play it on the cheesy portable phonograph I impulse-bought from a Sears Card mailer so I could play records in the kitchen. I am in for a magnificent reminder of why Brahms made it into the Three B’s. I go to the ladies’ room, distractedly dropping the bag and pen I just bought, not even noticing it till a lady points it out. Otherwise it would have been just another of the “I just had it, and now I don’t have it” scenarios I am so fond of enacting. I prop the bag up on the toilet paper dispenser—will I leave it there? I prop it up over the sink. Will I leave it there? For the time I take turning my back on it to dry my hands, is ample time for the bag to have disappeared. But there it waits, and I rejoice in my small victory of sanity. NOW MY BUTTis warming the—what is that salmon-ey color?—of the velvetine cushion of A106. All around me is that unintelligible language that is the sound of a gabbing mass of people speaking English. I can’t make out even one word. As the concertmaster takes the stage, I do well to shift one seat to A107, away from the fidgety hummer next to me who will play the concerto on his knees. My head can’t stop writing, though, and I force myself to focus. This moment is about sound, not thought. I mentally shake the words out of my brain. Andsnes and MTT make their appearance and I am as front and center as I can get, directly in front of the side of the piano and the Steinway soundboard, with the conductor’s podium behind it. I HAVE A CHEESECAKE ANGLEon the production, and am treated to a bizarre view of below-the-waist musicians, MTT’s legs from the knees down, and the ample belly of the violist in front of him. The concerto seems to be being performed by legs alone. It’s always amused me, when people’s upper halves are fuming and fussing and fighting, that their legs just stand there waiting to be moved again. MTT does little dance steps, rocking from heel to toe, or stretching tippy-toes, or standing still and prim as a pastor. Occasionally his hands and baton fly out beyond the side of the lid. When Andsnes strikes his first notes, the sound pouring out of the piano is so loud, lush and rounded that it detaches itself from the musicians performing it. It is pure sound, heavenly, ethereal sound radiating through the air like pulsing colors. The orchestral accompaniment seems to be emanating from a distant forest. The Orchestra is in the Zone, I am in the Zone. We are a cluster of humanity gathered in space and time giving and receiving holy communion. The performance is flawless and as usual I am first on my feet with the bravos. People are for some reason shy about collaborating in a mass Standing O (have you ever had a Standing O? Whoa!) and I stand alone half a minute. At the curtain call, a few select figures pop up here and there and at the second curtain call, the audience rises as one. By the fifth curtain call, the hall is filled with unabashed hooting, hollering, stamping, clapping. I impress a few more dents into my silver rings which collide with each other. They are misshapen from applauding. I shake my hands out. I tell my neighbor, if my hands hurt from clapping for two minutes, how must that guy’s feel after four killer movements of Brahms? FALL. BACK. DUDE. DURING THE INTERMISSIONI fill both sides of the bag and have to slice the side and bottom of it open with my new pen so I can write on the reverse side. The Fidgeter remarks to me that you hardly ever see anyone writing with a pen—he doesn’t even know how to anymore. He is curious and I tell him, I was writing something before I left the house, and my mind is still writing it. We engage in some pleasant banter—he is a swarthy Mediterranean type—my type, that is—with a manly tuft of chest hair peeping out from his shirt collar (a weakness of mine)–and then an interloper from the cheap seats arrives and takes the vacant seat between me and the Fidgeter. OK, so now I can go back to my column. As the hall quiets down, I am startled to see that the orchestra is fully assembled and hurriedly stash my paperwork under the seat. MTT could not help, my feet before him as he bowed before turning to the orchestra, but check out the black velvet and zebra striped flats I’d jumped into when the alarm sounded. They were respectable enough looking shoes, I felt. And I am treated to a full backal view of the dude as he raises his baton. OK, BRAHM’S 4THSo now the Interloper is going to conduct the damn thing on his knee. Deep into the symphony, deep in the forest, out of the corner of my eye, I discern that he has tissue paper on top of his program and is drawing some kind of freakin’ floor plan, his pencil moving back and forth and distracting me. I might as well get my paper bag back out. My blood begins to boil. I’d already been miffed when the ya-hoo on the other side of me who was sitting in front of principal cellist Michael Grebanier, was flipping through his program just as the poignant, haunting cello theme in the slow movement was in progress. Was he raised by wolves? The Interloper, though, had crossed the line. My heart rate accelerated. My attention was on him as the symphony came to a close. When the applause began, I shifted in my seat and said to him, calmly and evenly, “Excuse me—I’ve never said anything like this to anyone before, but if you are going to doodle while the orchestra is performing, you don’t belong in the front row. It’s very disrespectful to the musicians, and very distracting to me.” Then I gave myself a Standing Ovation. He is a gentle, simpatico enough looking guy, grooving to the tunes, and has a Teddy Neely Jesus thing going on. He sits there wordlessly applauding with a goofy grin on his face, not knowing how to respond. “Just take it as a lesson,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude.” THEN I’M EMBARRASSEDwhen the audience, including myself, gives a lukewarm (compared to the soloist) reception to the orchestra, and I’m personally letting them down with my lack of bravoing. Did they somehow fail me? People are getting up and putting coats on. I feel like I must somehow put a period to the Interloper episode and say to Jesus as I am leaving, “Sorry for being so frank.” Will it make an impression on him or not? Who knows. But score one for good manners. I decide to save a buck fifty and walk home to dissipate my annoyance. On the way, a big ol’ white Cadillac is blocking my path. Emboldened by my earlier show of bravura, I rip a section of the program out and leave under the windshield wiper the note: “Your car is in my way. The sidewalk is for pedestrians—that’s why they call it the sidewalk. – A citizen” [I don’t really know that it was a Cadillac; I had forgotten to notice, but God is in the details. Forgive a sinner like me. – Ed.] WELL, THAT SHOWED HIM!OK, that’s it for the night’s theatrics and I am on my doorstep turning the key. I have a flash that there have been some neighborhood break-ins and I fear I may have had my third computer stolen, and my column gone. No such bad luck. So I’m back on the couch I leapt from hours before, Zazu and Zzyzzy breathing peacefully beside me. Nothings warms me so much as knowing my cats are safe and secure and happy in the home I provide them. “Cats don’t live with people. People live with cats,” Kendelyn said at the sale. I considered this, but feel that my cats and I live together completely compatibly. “Mi casa su casa” is my policy. They can go ahead and scratch at my fabric armchair. I don’t care. What’s more important, the cats or the chair? I indulge them. Well, I do seem to have gone on, haven’t I? If you haven’t yet called 1-800-SHU-TUP! I will say goodnight. These have been my humble offerings. Thank you for being kind.
The author had her D! ------------------------------------------------------------ With the distant call of a muted horn,
Hear ye, hear ye, all ye miscreants: Stay out of the front orchestra or the ax will come down on you. copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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