by David Rakoff
And yet part of me understands fully. I’m an idiot but I’m not stupid. I get it that representation is reality’s more photogenic flip side. It’s best not to think too closely on what Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s teeth must have actually been like. Or those windswept heroes in countless Romantic paintings, standing on their solitary crags, gazing out Byronically over the roiling sea. It’s all beautiful desolation and man-against-the-elements-emergence-of-the-Self-birth-of-the-Modern fabulous; for the first time in history, masters of their own fates, their minds steeled and alert in the bracing sea air. The canvas gives no hint, nor should it, of the challenging trek it must have taken to reach those wave-washed spits of land, nor the malodorous discomfort of those sodden, pre-Gore-Tex garments, the chafing cotton and the lead-heavy wool. And underneath all that soaked and salty clothing, the poet’s skin, an angry red canvas of papulae and chilblains.
The Myth of the Bohemian persists with good reason. Given the choice between a day spent giving oneself over to oil painting, or one spent in the confining grid of office cubicles, most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop cloths, easels, turpentine, raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles holding drippy candle ends, and cavorting nude models, forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.
I lived in Brooklyn a long time ago, with my best friend, Natalia, on the second floor of a small two-story coach house. The basement still had its red dirt floor from the nineteenth century. We were a block away from a jail, in the heart of the borough’s Penal District (not yet a real estate term, but just wait). Across from the stately courthouse was a beautiful stretch of century-old brownstones, a sagging and wearily voluptuous rock pile, every straight line worn down over the years to a gentle curve. The windows had ancient, flaking gold-foil letters for the offices of bail bondsmen and ambulance-chasing lawyers. On the uninterrupted brick face of the westernmost side, an old wall advertisement touting divorces: $99! in an oddly cheerful font. During the day, the streets hummed with activity; a photogenic, Runyonesque bustle of lawyers, judges, perps, and private dicks, but at night, it was an absolute dead zone.
My neighbors directly across the street were a family of pitbull-owning drug dealers. Their fort was held down by a mother and her young son, Seymour, and adolescent daughter, Vickie, along with an intermittent cast of male characters. It was during these years and from this family that I learned, intimately, the words maricón and pendejo. Two doors down from them, a neon sign in a window advertised DÉLICES DE SAIGON, although in the four years that I lived there, I saw no signs of life from that building, delicious, Vietnamese, or otherwise. Directly beside us lived a reclusive Bakelite-radio enthusiast whose apartment was a hangout for a gaggle of boys from the nearby homeless shelter. We could hear him screaming at them ceaselessly through the bathroom wall.
Once you got indoors, the apartment was essentially perfect. A lovely and cheerful place with folding wooden shutters, and a working fireplace clad in green slate to augment the feeble efforts of the old gas heater in the winter. In the summer, the windows on both sides were a fine substitute for air-conditioning. For the occasional heat wave—those stretches when the cool-down strategy of switching to menthols simply didn’t work, when one moved about the city irritable, aphasic with sleeplessness, and salty as a deer lick—there was a box fan, purchased at the nearby Abraham and Straus department store. I had been surprised to find that the thing actually came with directions, beyond “plug in and turn on.” The best way to cool a room, according to the ancient, pretech principles of cross-ventilation, is to place a fan facing out the window farthest away from you. This will force the warm air from the apartment, while drawing air from the outside through the windows nearer by. I did it. It worked. I switched back to regular cigarettes.
Standing at the kitchen sink, we could look out the window at the huge plane and flowering chestnut trees in the surprisingly lush backyards of the whole block. And no plot was wilder or greener than the one directly beneath the kitchen window, an overgrown jungle at the back of an old single-room-occupancy* rooming house. The house was as untamed as its garden. It appeared that the entire cubic volume of every room was filled with stuff, Collyer brothers–style: ironing boards, cardboard suitcases, electric toasters and fans, plastic bags cinched and bulging, laundry baskets swelling like wine barrels, all of it piled up, floor to ceiling, right to the windows. The most visible resident was an old alcoholic woman, not a day under seventy. Natalia and I had dubbed her “Madame Balzac” for some reason. (Why exactly has been erased by the years. I’ve only ever read one Balzac novel, but we were in our smart-ass twenties. I think it had something to do with our Madame’s habit of lobbing her garbage out of her windows into the yard. Perhaps a character did something similar in Père Goriot? Who can remember …) When not seated on the front stoop in a soiled, threadbare black shift, drunkenly screaming “Fawkin’ niggah!” at anyone who walked by, Madame Balzac would spend her time climbing the fire escape in back from room to room, quite naked. Whatever the weather, there she would be, the aging flaps and dewlaps of her raddled skin shuddering up and down the rusty iron ladders.
On the ground floor below me was an office that did … what, exactly? Résumés, taxes? I can’t remember. What I do remember is the man whose office it was: Raul Rivas. That is his real name. Raul Rivas was knee-bucklingly handsome. Perhaps if my life had been different, had I been a hot girl with a driver’s license, say, I might have put on a tube top and gone outside to wash my car in slow motion, dousing the cherry-red hood of my automobile in a spew of water from a long hose and then working it up into a suggestive and creamy froth, while Raul Rivas watched me through the open office door, sweating through his white undershirt, just like Burt Lancaster in The Killers… but, I digress.
Once during the day—it must have been a weekend because I was at home—I could hear Raul Rivas having sex in the office downstairs. I skittered around the apartment like a cockroach on a frying pan, trying not to make noise while desperately looking for a knothole in the crappy floorboards. Eventually I just lay down flat against the tile of the kitchen floor, listening.
Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell. I was robbed in that neighborhood twice—once by a fellow who asked me for all my money and when I demurred, showed me the gun in the waistband of his trousers while suggesting that I reorganize my priorities, and the second time when I blithely walked into the Laundromat to find the poor young fellow who gave out quarters sitting there, glum, mute, and at gunpoint. I wasn’t remotely hurt in either instance (that honor was reserved for the tony West Village, where I had the shit beaten out of me one night by some toughs who, in the process, roughed up my copy of Dombey and Son and took my wallet—a largely valueless quarry back in the days before I had a credit card—and had to confine their criminal activities to taking books out of the library in my name and never returning them), but still, there were days when it hardly seemed worth it to live in a horrible part of town just so I could go daily to a stupid, soul-crushing, low-paying job. Especially since, as deeply as I yearned to be creative, for years and years I was too scared to even try. So I did nothing. But here’s something I did do:
I paid my fucking rent.
It isn’t that I don’t sympathize with the lassitude. I understand it all too well. Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food
. So truly, if you’re already getting laid and have managed to fall in with an attractive and like-minded group without the added indignity of diving face-first into a cesspool every single time you sit down to work, no one understands better than I do why one might not bother.
The rude precariousness of this constant beginner-hood would be enough disincentive without the added mind fuck of how diametrically counter the creative trajectory runs to all other tasks. Among the multitude of reasons that it is better to be a grown-up than a child, just one is the mastery of the physical world. As a child, the distance between desire and execution was a maddeningly unbridgeable chasm. What the mind’s eye pictured and what the body could achieve were altogether different: those stubby safety scissors could only ever cut an edge that was ragged and inelegant; glitter was invariably swallowed up into the pile of carpets as if by malicious intent, like Charlie Brown’s grinning, kite-eating tree; the dried macaroni we were forced to incorporate into designs didn’t have the decency to stay on the page, despite the glue getting everywhere (even at age four I understood this to be the lowest form, the operetta of visual art). Regardless of the medium, everything at that age ended up a muddy, crumb-flecked mess. In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the protagonist, Flan, says: “When the kids were little, we went to a parents’ meeting at their school and I asked the teacher why all her students were geniuses in the second grade? … Matisses everyone … What is your secret? And this is what she said: ‘Secret? I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.’ ” Rather than a time of wonder and innocence, the all of it was a daily exercise in frustration and chubby-fingered inefficacy.
But then hands grow from smudging little mitts into useful instruments. The soup does not splash up over the rim, the glitter—should one ever be moved to use any—would stay where it was meant to. One progresses from novice to adept with a soothing reliability. Except for writing. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
And yet, I don’t for a moment forget that this is not a life of mining coal, waiting tables, or answering someone’s phone for a living. Each morning begins suffused with this sense of privilege, shell-pink and pulsing with new hope. The terrors and agitations of the night fade away and here it is, the clean expanse that is 6:00 AM, free of most everything but promise. Caffeination, evacuation, ablution, through all of which I spool out lovely and eloquent paragraphs in my head. And so to the gym where the lungs take in the new air, the fresh blood courses, and look! Here it is, barely 8:30. You’ll be home and at your desk, scribbling away before other folks have even gotten to work! What grandiose hopes for the deathless prose that will be hoiked up from your depths, taking as evidence the sentences that flow easily through the mind as you do your crunches, the language graceful, propelled forward by the power of its own logic, a Slinky waterfalling effortlessly down a staircase. The toddlers of the day-care center next door are delivered. The carousing teenagers from the high school across the street deposit their cell phones and dime bags into the shrubbery by the stoop and line up for the metal detectors. The computer is turned on, opening up to the file left off the day before. Today will be good, you think. Not like the previous day’s lack of industry, a shameful waste of phone calls, e-mail, snacking, and onanism.
Yes, it is all about today. But first, the crossword. And what does Paul Krugman have to say? Oh, that Gail Collins. Love her. E-mail, has it been checked in the last forty seconds? And now a snack. Friend Patty calls. She can’t settle, either. Midday already? The toddlers, now screaming, are picked up from next door. Sit down and write a sentence for God’s sake. One fucking sentence, it won’t kill you. It almost kills you. Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of Lord of the Flies. A sullen coven with neither conscience nor allegiance. It will take the civilizing influence of repeated revision to whip them into shape, an exhausting prospect. Time for the late-afternoon power nap (“Ten minutes is all I need, and then I’m good for the rest of the day!” you brag to anyone who cares to listen). You rise, refreshed, your sense of creative optimism restored—or it would be if it wasn’t for the maniac on the street crackling that cellophane wrapper. Who the hell does he think he is? Stand at the window and scan the sidewalk like a crazy person. Uh-oh, here comes that woman with her schnauzers again, animals that exist in a constant state of high barking dudgeon. Log on to that dog-breed website (again) to see how long the average life span is for such a creature. How much Xanax crushed up and mixed into some ground beef would it take to … never mind. Sit back down. And nothing. Whither flown the clarity of those morning insights? How many times must it be demonstrated to you that that interval of genius is as thin and fragile as the skin of an onion, if not downright illusory? And yet you never rush to the desk to get the pearls down on paper because in the moment of thought, they seem incapable of dissipation. So immortal, so solid in their reasoning, like those musings just before dropping off to sleep. Why disturb this almost-slumber by writing? The Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t crumble simply because one shifts one’s gaze from it. Of course I’ll remember something this obviously brilliant in the morning, only to wake the next day without the remotest idea. Might as well finish eating that dried mango.
Oh, Google, how does one make soap?
The teenagers leave school, a good forty minutes of profanity (as comic genius Jackie Hoffman has observed, “It’s all ‘What the shit the fuck you are!’ And the boys are even worse”). The street goes quiet again. You can see the custodial staff cleaning the classrooms. The streetlights come on. They’d look so pretty against the sapphire of the early-evening sky if they didn’t signify the hours you’ve wasted. If you were any kind of writer, you’d stay in and do battle, wrest the time back and make the day mean something more than the nothing it is turning out to be. But you are not any kind of writer. Today has proven as much. As did yesterday and odds are tomorrow will attest to the same. Pregnant with Potential has turned to Freighted with Failure. And so another day fails to meet its promise and has spun out into procrasturbatory entropy. You power down the computer. Just before the screen goes dark, the sentence you wrote chuckles and says, “Until tomorrow, maestro.” Its tone is contemptuous, vaguely threatening, and deeply reminiscent of somebody’s voice you can’t quite place (three guesses whose). You will see friends and they will ask after your day and you will complain, charmingly (although not nearly as charmingly as you think), about what you haven’t accomplished. Sometimes, it’s just easier to go to dinner. Although, when you wake briefly at 4:00 AM in an anxious fury with yourself, you will know it is also exponentially so much more difficult to have gone to dinner.
The truest depiction of the writing life remains Nicolas Cage in the movie Adaptation, crippled by fear of inadequacy into near-complete inaction, opting to masturbate for the umpteenth time that day. His legs are the only thing visible on-screen, shaking, defeated, his off-camera body working its way to a sad and dribbling (anti)climax, the only thing he will produce the whole day.
And I understand, I really do. Who wants to hear a song about that?
It is never easy to publicly oppose something that achieves brilliant, unstoppable heights. It can make you seem bitter. I once ran into a friend and his mother at the movies. The subject of Philip Roth came up. (No surprise, really. We Jews are always talking about Philip Roth. We speak of little else, in fact.) It turns out my friend’s mother had known him growing up in Newark. She was not a fan.
“Pffffft. Philip Roth,” she spat. “He was such a jerk. I always wished him ill.”
Well, good luck with that, I thought, as the lights went down.
We were at The Red Sh
oes, possibly the best movie ever made. Certainly one of the best movies ever made about what it means to be creative. Moira Shearer plays Victoria Page, a girl whose single-minded devotion to the ballet makes her a great star. Everyone loves Vickie and everyone wants to mold her to his own purposes: the multilingual ballet impresario with the silk dressing gown and pencil mustache; her husband, the composer. Finally, it is all too much for poor Vickie. Moments before she is to take the stage in Monte Carlo, she snaps, and in full ballet makeup—her mouth a red slash, her eyes darkly rimmed and extended like pointed black leaves—she runs from the theater, down the broad stone steps of the opera house, and flings herself over an ornate balustrade into the path of an oncoming train fifty feet below.
The greatest dancer of her time is gone. She has literally died for the art that, in life, consumed her constantly and completely. All is loss and sorrow. Still, the ballet of The Red Shoes goes on as scheduled, as it must, and in Victoria Page’s stead, a lone spotlight, illuminating the places she would have been dancing. It is a fitting tribute, this bright absence, gliding across the stage. Because without the work, there is nothing.
*Single Room Occupancy, or SRO, was a ubiquitous, albeit thankfully vicarious, acronym in my early New York life. There were SROs in virtually every neighborhood in town, certainly every neighborhood I lived in. After college, I worked in a literary agency that had briefly dabbled in talent representation, and the occasional headshot still found its way over the transom. It amazed me at the time that almost every cover letter spoke of performing for “SRO audiences.” I remember thinking—while fondly picturing Stage Door Canteen–like evenings of valiant thespians entertaining the borderline indigent with monologues from The Glass Menagerie or selections from the Harold Arlen songbook—My goodness, I had no idea that New York’s acting community was so civic-minded! It wasn’t until years later when someone pointed out to me that SRO also meant “Standing Room Only.”