by Jaime Lowe
Things were changing with me. What was purely physical, a punch card of experience, was becoming emotional. Through all of this, lithium was something I took without thinking, something that worked without question, something I kept in a pill box with me at all times just in case I ended up in someone else’s bed. I was growing and lithium was helping me to grow by being quiet and in the background. I did what I wanted and a new creature was emerging.
I imagine a butterfly’s life from minuscule to breaking free—the egg laid on a milkweed leaf. An insect at first, a caterpillar, long, thick, stubby, systemically eating the green she was born to. She grows, and she hangs from a milkweed stem until a pupa forms around her body. Inside the pupa, tissue, limbs, and organs form, pushing against the casing—a metamorphosis from crawler to flight. The change is protected by a silky cocoon until that protective cocoon is shed. But there’s a struggle behind that change, there’s violence and transformation. I could feel that coming and I could feel wings growing too.
I was bad at my job. Being drunk half the time didn’t help. My basic tasks were organization and mailing things and addressing envelopes en masse. I could never pay my bills on time or manage to organize a sock drawer or even wear matching socks, let alone manage thousands of photography shoots that I would have to pull and present at will. My most terrifying moments were when Dominique remembered an interior and asked to see it; I would go to the chromes storage and the interior was gone; chaos would ensue while I looked for the project until Dominique was distracted by something else. But she took note, and everyone knew I was not meant to be a photo assistant. I loved photography and taking photos. I took advantage of the fact that I was responsible for signing off on printing invoices and shot every weekend. Sometimes I would blow three rolls on one building corner. I started using my color Xerox machine art collages as invitations to parties that I mailed to my friends and colleagues and complete strangers.
By November 1999, I told Dr. Schwartz what was clear to me, that painting didn’t feel like a career path but publishing did. In the same session we decided “to get off lithium. We planned to go to 600 mg every other week from 900 mg, starting right away.” A month later I was down to 600 milligrams and I felt a little twinge of giddiness. Having hit the year anniversary of my employment (a crucial benchmark for first jobs), I started looking for another job. I got my first music review published. The Village Voice’s music editor Chuck Eddy let me write a bordering-on-offensive analysis of Korean pop, and I felt like I had a chance to become a freelance writer if I could cobble together a few different sources of income. I wrote about Blackalicious and I carved a niche of obscurish indie Bay Area rap reviews along with whatever was being overlooked or unknown by East Coast music writers and editors. I tried to fill in gaps with my pitches, things that weren’t going to be covered by actual music writers. I still harbored fantasies of being an artist. In therapy, I talked about a project I imagined. I wanted to decorate and paint and take over an entire subway car, living in one portion and interacting with strap-hangers as they commuted, for a week or a month or a year. I just didn’t know how to go about it. I was more interested in art than work and would routinely visit Charles, aka Stanley, aka the receptionist at the New Yorker on the twenty-second floor. He held himself with gravitas and had a booming voice that rivaled James Earl Jones. He and I would talk and I convinced him to hang one of my resin triptyches in a group show that he curated in the lobby. It was about my stay at NPI and included one section of pipes, one of the grassy squirrel knoll, and one of the actual building. The placards were painted red and had words etched in gold that described various phrases of fear. (It was my first and only piece of art in an art show.)
I was getting in trouble more frequently at work, for losing chromes or not knowing where they were in the first place or being completely disengaged with our mission to present a narrative of luxury interiors. I thought about quitting in April after some disaster or another, no doubt caused by my inability to organize. We continued the decrease of lithium and as the dosage went down my plans to escape Condé Nast were forged. I became friends with the research editor and begged her to teach me how to fact-check. I pitched relentlessly, and hoped that when I was fired/quit I could rely on some writing work and some freelance fact-checking. In May, I preemptively quit. (I was clearly going to be asked to leave and I just decided it was better if I did it for them. I mean I probably would have been asked to fire myself anyway.) The art and photo department had a sad nacho party for my good-bye event, and there was little to do except slink out the side door with as many office supplies and custom tote bags as I could carry. I started fact-checking at Stuff magazine and writing short front-of-book articles for Maxim and Stuff and I had regular music reviews in the Village Voice. By mid-November I was on the lowest dose of lithium possible before entirely eliminating it. Dr. Schwartz wrote: “She informed me today that she decreased the lithium and wondered if the new improvements in her life since then were related. She felt better about herself and her work, she’s lost weight and goes to the gym, and she’s changed the clothes and hairdo—generally making herself more attractive. She decreased her drinking and decreased the one-night stands.”
ME, TAKING MORE SELF-PORTRAITS THAN USUAL, STANDING IN FRONT OF THE POPPY MURAL I PAINTED ON THE LOFT’S DINING-ROOM WALL.
I had a new life and a fabulous gay hairdresser who cut my unkempt, frizzy hair into a lioness mane. He plucked my eyebrows. I was no longer tethered to an everyday office job. And I was off my meds. I would visit Stanley at the New Yorker, I would shop for fresh vegetables and fall gourds, and I had a new morning routine. Light a few candles and take myself through self-guided yoga. I would breathe calmly and with the feeling of enlightenment, as if all the heartache and stress had come from the lithium. I felt happy again, motivated and unworried by life or logic. I had energy. I had ideas. I did thirty push-ups and thirty sit-ups and ended every morning with a headstand against the wall; I could feel the day rush by before it even happened. A close friend of my dad’s cousin Pam (my cousin too, but more like an aunt) ran the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and they were looking for a communications director. I interviewed for the job but did not get it. However, and this is the biggest HOWEVER possible, it left a big impression. Censorship became my cause, my central focus. I devised a plan to write a book, do fund-raisers, and raise awareness about First Amendment rights and censorship issues in general. I invited my friend Josh, a fellow editor, to join the team, which I named RedSpark Productions. I gave him an impassioned pitch.
“First Amendment rights are the only thing you should care about.”
“I care about the First Amendment,” he said.
“They are crucial, the backbone of our industry. A free press. A real N.E.A. How much money do you need?”
“I’m really more interested in just being a writer or editing,” he said calmly.
“Fifty K?”
“I need to make more money than what you are offering.”
I had not one dollar to actually pay him. And upped the offer. He still said no.
It did not deter me.
By November 22, Dr. Schwartz’s notes indicated that I got the job offer from NCAC. From The Notes: “Jaime seemed thrilled because the NCAC would pay her to do the book project she planned on doing anyway,” he writes. “She began discussing a benefit for them that will involve lots of art stars and musicians which they could do at the Playboy Mansion. She envisions herself hobnobbing with Beck and Matthew Ritchie. We discussed whether her excitement could lead to mania, but she feels well within her self-control for now.” The most notable thing about this is that I never got a job offer from the NCAC and they never offered to publish a book on censorship. I must have been confused or conflating an imaginary future with one that I was trying to will into existence.
For Thanksgiving, Hana, Sarah P., and I drove up to Maine. We
cooked Brussels sprouts that were so organic they had worms crawling out of their crowns; I insisted on not washing them, it was simply more protein. We roasted gourds, so many gourds. We drank cheap red wine and ran naked from the sauna to the cold freshwater lake in snow boots, our skin streaked red from heat, our bodies and spirits pliable.
ME, GREETING LAKE THOMPSON IN NOVEMBER.
I continued my morning routine, only adding what Sarah recalls as “300 sit-ups and pushups a day. You encouraged Hana and I to follow suit but we were a little bit too lazy.” Hana remembered my waking up at five thirty a.m. with the sun and that I was obsessed with the loons and the loon calls—their echo against the lake. We had an animated discussion about little people and performance. I can’t remember my exact argument but it probably went something like this: I am not in favor of anyone being taken advantage of, but if little people want to perform, they should perform; if they feel there are significantly less opportunities because they are little people, that is fucked up. I think this was a two- to three-hour argument, mostly because I was fired up and increasingly argumentative. I was also taking rolls and rolls of photos, some nudes, some double exposures, some shots of trees overlapping trees like a plaid made of branches, a psychedelic canopy of bark. I told Hana and Sarah they would all be published in the New Yorker. My meetings for coffee with Stanley had morphed into this idea that my photos would be in the New Yorker and that eventually my writing would be, too. Hana and I drove home after dropping Sarah off in Boston and we got so lost that we ended up in Albany.
In another entry a week later, I told Dr. Schwartz that I did not feel carried away with big ideas; nevertheless the big ideas continued to develop. Now there was a movie attached to the book, fund-raising, and an awareness campaign. Additionally, I told Dr. Schwartz, this would all end with my marrying Beck. He writes, “Ultimately she wants power, money, fame, and Beck.”
Just before Christmas, Dave published an article in Marie Claire that included some references to our frustrated and nonexistent relationship. It was also a chapter in a book he wrote years later. He didn’t tell me about the article (or the book). The article didn’t bother me; I was a little flattered. At the same time that he published the account, I was distracted by a rare one-night crush that cut deeper than most. I met a Peace Corps volunteer who had just returned from Kyrgyzstan at the Village Idiot. The Pabst hole that was dirty, dizzy, and perfect for certain needs; you could always find someone if you waited long enough. I was drunk and smitten, and he was just drunk. “Every 10 minutes or so a garbage truck would hurl through the driveway,” I wrote a month later for a personal essay for the Voice. “Lighting our chins and the trail of spit between our mouths, spider webbing its way from shoulder to ear to throat to teeth to temple . . . In my bed we talked of tiger force, had squirrelly cuddles and loud lap dancing. He asked, ‘Did you feel the shocks? Did you feel them?’ I smiled. I didn’t have to say yes.” I felt with him—a glimpse of love. Lust, yes, but also body, spirit, mind sharing, the kind of feeling that elevates and creates a rainbow sheen on life. Dr. Schwartz said in his notes that I felt “spectacular, that it was spectacular.” Weeks later, I thought I might be pregnant even though we didn’t actually have sex. It was part of some immaculate theory. (No one flagged this as a grand delusion . . .)
I was still—even more so—obsessed with my First Amendment project. I had dinner with Aaron, my old roommate, who had since moved to Los Angeles, and basically told him I was producing a benefit concert with Sting and others. I shouted my manifesto to anyone who would listen, including Dr. Schwartz, who noted that I “yelled” the mission statement at him during a session.
The introductory letter of a twelve-page packet that I had put together explained the project Censor This and ended with a rallying cry:
It is time for a pre-emptive strike, a change in thought, action, and responsibility. It is time for the arts communities to band together to nurture creativity and freedom of expression. . . .
The answer lies in a grassroots movement of, for, and by the artist. It is time to take on Tipper and Joe [Gore and Lieberman, respectively], it is time to demand an explanation of the MPAA ratings system, it is time to fill the void where the NEA once existed, it is time for a revolution.
This is a call to arms. But rather than resorting to guns and ammo, let us use the resources at hand. The following proposal requires three things: funding, participation, and a belief that the first amendment is the crux and livelihood of creativity and education in America.
To paraphrase Springsteen, it takes a spark to light a fire, and baby, I’ll be your gun for hire.
• • •
I HAD A LIST of about 250 people I was planning to send the packet to. I was determined to involve everyone I knew in the project, including a rabbi, half of the media, and anyone whose address I had access to, including authors, artists, politicians, and every press relations person I had any contact with in my brief time as a music reporter. Anyone. I was jacked about my Lollapalooza-of-speech-freedom event and irritated by many everyday concerns.
For Christmas 2000, I bought dozens of tiny Buddhas from Pearl River and gave them to everyone I could think of, including Dr. Schwartz. My moods were pushing and pulling like a current—tense, then calm, elated, then angry. I got in fights with friends—my friend Effie and I stopped talking altogether—but I continued my yoga-stand-on-my-head ritual. I told Dr. Schwartz I quit my health insurance, which I had actually done months prior. I was angered by my bank and started to develop a barter system—I decided I would operate without money. The truth was I had very little money anyway. I could trade for necessities, I thought. I made granola religiously and started filling my pockets with the cereal so that I could share grains with the world. I was wandering into doorways and talking with the neighborhood’s longtime residents—furriers, garment sellers, and one outsider artist who packed decades of work into a ground-floor storefront around the corner from my apartment.
I was feeling otherworldly but was not functioning in this world at all.
CHAPTER 15
AND NOW FOR A PSYCHOTIC BREAK . . . OR THAT TIME I ALMOST GOT MARRIED ON TOP OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
WHEN I ROUNDED the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Sixth, I knew. I saw the lights at the end of the block, I saw the flash rounding around the corner and bending toward me. I walked slow and then fast and then slow again, thinking, no, those lights weren’t for me. Sirens in New York are as common as bagels, as native as egg ’n’ cheeses and drop-and-fold laundry. I was fine, it was okay. I was wearing Marilyn’s sealskin boots lined with wool from the 1970s, a wraparound fluorescent floral skirt over long johns, and my coiffed red ’fro. I had just been interviewed for a job to be an editor at Blender magazine. I told Andy, the editor in chief, that I was not interested in a cumbersome job, a daily job, but that if he would like to collaborate on my Censor This project, I would consider letting him in on the action. I gave him some pocket granola and left. I took photos in the hallway of Blender’s offices—of their fire escape, fire signs, the poles that crisscrossed on the ceiling of the emergency stairwell. I did double exposures—it was a crisp winter day with harsh light. The blues and reds came through in high relief, carving out details of prewar buildings that seemed tall and mighty when they were erected.
Then on my walk home, I got to the end of my street and turned left, where three fire engines blocked traffic on Seventh Avenue. They couldn’t be for me. I walked faster again.
I counted the floors calmly, each time coming to the conclusion that the burnt-out cave with broken windows and splintered beams was not my apartment. I did not live there. That was the floor above or the floor below but absolutely not where I slept every night. And I counted again, and everyone looked at me as if it was my apartment. I counted again.
MY APARTMENT ON FIRE.
“Jaime, that’s your apartment,”
a voice said. And I shook my head no. No, that is not where I live.
And then, with my legs buckling under me, and my knees hitting the hard, dirty ice, I passed out. Cold. I remember the freezing sensation of falling and the inability to use my muscles to hold my body upright. I collapsed on the hard, dirt-caked ice. Mike squatted next to me. “Are you okay? Do you need to call anyone? Are you okay?”
I was not. I called my roommates from the camera store across the street; Jeremy was calm, my other roommate (the investment banker) understandably less so. For some reason I called Andy at Blender, who said I should call my parents; I called my parents. My mom was not surprised because of various elevated e-mails I’d been sending. I went to see the apartment and was struck by the suffocating smell of char. I couldn’t get the burn off my hands. I couldn’t see the apartment I lived in under the wet wreckage. A mural of poppies I’d painted directly on the dining room wall was streaked with brown and black. My clothes were half burned from the bottom up and soaked. My papers, computer, bed, everything. All my art was burned. One piece that lived in a Plexiglas box, recycled from a House & Garden shoot, looked like a moonscape—melted resin dripping and sagging like a thick-lipped smile. This fire was clearly a sign from God that I should be living possession-free, that I was being communicated to by a higher power, a pagan power, a fiery force of nature.