The next night we go back and we are sitting alone. It’s a bit early, so people are still sort of flowing in. A handsome boy walks past. We make eye contact—quickly, of course—across the room a couple of times. I hope he’ll come over. And he does. He introduces himself. He’s Italian. Marco. He’s dressed like a professor: black sweater over a button-up shirt, dress pants, nice shoes that look dressy but lived in. He travels alone. He’s studying to be a diplomat. What the hell does that mean? He laughs when I buy him a drink as a peace offering because of our two countries’ disagreement over Amanda Knox.
He kisses me that night on the roof of our Airbnb. There’s a tiny piscina up there we never end up using. He’s so Italian and he keeps dramatically saying, “You’re so soft. Your skin is so soft, oh my God.” I laugh but I’m secretly totally swooning.
He is on his way to another city in two days. And we are going to Ibiza. Marco and I exchange WhatsApp numbers. I talk to him a lot. For hours a day. I wind up breaking my foot my first night in Ibiza, when I’m trying to “take it easy” and have a more relaxed, early night. I miss a step after getting bottles of Coke from a bar because I don’t want to drink alcohol that night. Mackenzie took half an ecstasy and she keeps asking to borrow people’s jackets because she’s so cold. I don’t think it’s a good idea for two girls on their own to be messed up in Ibiza. I have been immediately on alert since we’ve gotten here. I look at everyone who approaches us and try to determine whether or not they’re a sex trafficker.
Anyway, I miss a small step and my damn foot breaks. I have always had this vasovagal response thing where I faint when I see my own blood but also sort of whenever I feel any kind of trauma. I start to faint at the table. We are with two Irish girls named Laura and now they are stuck with a fainting person who can’t walk on her own and this person on ecstasy who is close to tears about being cold.
I sob all night when I get back to the hotel. I can’t believe I broke my fucking foot on my first night here. Not only that, I’m going immediately back to SNL when I’m home. How will I do it with a broken foot?
Marco texts me in the morning, Buongiorno principessa, like Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful. Marco constantly reminds me of Roberto Benigni. He talks passionately and he’s over-the-top with a gleam in his eye as if he knows he’s putting it on a little. I like it.
I go to a clinic the next morning. They want to give me a hard cast, but I keep saying, “No. Soy actriz,” because it turns out most of the Spanish I learned from a couple months of practicing on Duolingo before the trip involved eating apples and not breaking one’s foot. They don’t give me a hard cast but make me promise to go immediately to a foot doctor when I’m back in New York in less than a week (where I’ll end up getting a walking boot).
I spend most of the rest of the trip indoors with my foot wrapped in bandages and on crutches. So I spend a lot of the time getting to know this funny Italian. We talk about music and family and movies and language and travel, and by the time I get home, we are sending each other childhood pictures. We talk every day. Always ending before five p.m. my time because he’s always asleep by eleven or so his time. Sometimes that frustrates me. I get lonely at night in my time zone and I wish I could talk to him then.
I go to Rome for a week that fall with friends to visit him. He makes a trip to New York for New Year’s Eve. The first couple of days are nice and then I start feeling annoyed with him in my little apartment. It feels like we lost the connection and can’t get it back, and I start to resent him for taking up so much of my little space. I feel guilty, but I don’t even want him to kiss me. We have two talks where I “break up” whatever we had. He is as dramatic about this as everything else. I don’t mean dramatic in a mean way. He’s just always a little more than most people I know. He says he’s heartbroken. I feel awful.
Two months later he sends me an Italian book. There’s a Polaroid inside. It’s me, but just my back really, and just a sliver of the side of my face. He caught me right as I was turning away. I’m turning away from him in the photo. This is how he sees me.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to be with another person or if it’s just not for me.
On April 1 this year, I send Marco a message on Instagram. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in about five years.
“I don’t know where you are or how you are or if it’s shallow to send a message now, but I know I went through a rough time and my life has changed very much in three weeks. So I’m thinking of you and hope you and your family are all safe. And I know how much traveling means to you, so I imagine this is even more difficult. Sending my thoughts and love and solidarity from across the way in New York.”
I wonder how he will feel about me reaching out. He responds that night: “Hi Cec, it’s not shallow at all.”
He goes on and says he’s in Rome and he’s safe and then he goes into a lengthy discussion about the government response in Italy and how the way of life has changed, and he’s written so much, always too much, which makes me laugh. The second giant paragraph starts with “According to the media…” That’s Marco.
At the end of the note, though, I tear up a little. He says: “I know how sensitive you are and I hope you’re not suffering too much. I send all my love and thoughts.”
I’m still soft to him.
And that does, in fact, soften me. I tell him about Owen and my anxiety and the house in the woods. He says: “I can’t imagine how hard it has been to fight fear and pain alone.” We talk about Cuomo. Marco tells me not to worry too much: “It’s going to be a beautiful summer.”
We leave the conversation there, with another lengthy message about philosophy from Marco. I decide that’s a good way to end it.
We haven’t talked since. But I’m glad I had the connection. Five years ago and four weeks ago.
I feel slightly less alone.
May 11, 2020
I haven’t written in a week. Been doing a lot of work for SNL. And I’m still so tired. The days are unpredictable and bizarre even though they seem so insignificant nobody can tell you what day it is. What a combo. May 6, for instance: I woke up and I checked my phone to discover my landlord Howard had passed away from COVID in April. His daughter emailed me. I said how sorry I was. She mentioned how fond he was of me. And I liked him too. He made me laugh, because Howard had clearly typed my very long lease on a typewriter as opposed to a computer and preferred real mail over email. (I have never liked the term snail mail but I especially don’t like it now, because it feels dismissive of anything that doesn’t involve modern technology and I really miss things that don’t involve modern technology. Plus it seems most of the world is moving slower these days anyway, so the expression seems weirdly outdated.)
Then two hours later I was filming something for SNL. After that, a good friend since second grade texted me: My dad just got taken to the ER with a fever. We can’t be with him. My heart sank. I texted my parents. Fuck. He can’t have covid. I tried to be optimistic about this virus that’s taken so many so quickly. I filmed another bit for SNL at Home. Right before bed, my friend texted me that her dad tested negative for COVID. He had a kidney infection. I was so relieved! I laughed with Matt and Kevin about how strange it is to be so relieved to hear someone has a kidney infection. What a day.
May 12, 2020
I get a text from Megan informing me that someone made a reservation for the Airbnb for June. She’s sorry she can’t keep it for us, but this is a long-term rental. She’s been letting us sort of “play it by ear” up until now. We’d extend for a couple weeks or a couple of months. I don’t know when I’ll be back in the city. I know I’m not ready.
I knew this day would come, but I was hoping to put it off a little longer, I suppose. I sit with Kevin and Matt and bring up maybe staying in the Hudson Valley. I need to hear what the words sound like I guess. I need to say it out loud. I’m not going back.
I find a new rental house on Airbnb. It’s in Rhinebeck. I had lunch t
here once with my friend Kent who writes for SNL. It seemed nice. I reserve it for June and part of July.
I thank Megan for everything. She’s sorry to see us go. She offers to sell me the house as her Realtor friend convinced her to put it on the market. It’s a good time to sell if you have a house in the woods. I can’t buy a house now. It’s a nice thought for a second. But it’s not real. Although I don’t know what’s real right now, to be honest. I can’t think about a home. I’m scared of my home.
Later, she texts that she’s going to bring me potting soil and some planter pots. She says she has extra.
In case I need them for my new “little garden.”
She’s talking about the little basil plants I have just placed outside on the deck near my bedroom.
I don’t really know what I’m doing.
But Megan wants to help of course. She likes to encourage me to do things outside, in the sun. She’s offered me bikes, kayaks, board games, hikes, dinners and lunches from her restaurant. A home.
And now, even though she can’t offer me her home anymore, she’s on her way with soil.
She’s still helping me plant my roots.
May 13, 2020
My dad sends me an email today. Owen’s website is going up this Friday. People can post pictures and writings and his music. There will be a section of just his day-to-day “things,” like maybe a picture of Owen’s favorite shirt. I love all of this, but I know I’m not ready to just click on it yet. I’ll take my time. I know I’ve only dipped my toes into the grief over Owen’s loss. I’m not ready to dive in fully. I’m worried there’s a good chance I’ll drown.
A stink bug flew at my head and landed inside the lampshade today. I flew off the bed. I am so afraid of bugs. All of them. But I also don’t like to kill anything. I sobbed for hours after spraying a wasp nest once. I joke all the time that I’m a Zen Buddhist. I caught the stink bug in a glass and held thick paper over the top so I could very slowly and carefully walk it outside. I’m trying to be quiet because Megan and her partner are planting new flowers in the pots out front on the deck. I set the stink bug glass out back and the glass of course immediately shatters. The bug is okay, the glass is not. Oh well. I’m not a perfect Zen Buddhist.
* * *
I HAD A Zen Buddhist friend once. Her name was Megu. I met her my senior year in high school. At my art school. My last of three high schools.
I went to public school and enjoyed most of my classes and did lots of theater. I bought my first bag of pot with my best friend Liz my sophomore year. It was just as you’d imagine the first bag of pot a fifteen-year-old would buy in 1999. It was full of stems and seeds and I really didn’t know what to do with it, seeing as buying rolling papers and rolling a joint was laughably out of my league. I didn’t have anything to smoke out of either, as I wasn’t yet brave enough to go to a “head shop” in the city. You had to be eighteen in there, right? And honestly I didn’t know any weed lingo, and that was almost scarier. Having to say “bowl” or “pipe” or “one-hitter,” and did I say “weed” even? Did people say “pot”? Would people think I was a loser if I said the wrong word? I mean, it’s sort of astonishing I ever bought pot in the first place because of my fear over not following the rules and getting into trouble. I was one of the only people among my friends and acquaintances who never even had a fake ID. I used one exactly once in my life, borrowed from a friend’s older sister. I was twenty. I was months away from being of legal drinking age, but here I was with a racing pulse, full of anxiety that I was doing something illegal. The whole time I was pretending to be having fun with some friends at one of the local bars on the “strip” in the town next to mine. Oak Park was dry, so all of the bars were in a town called Forest Park. I went to the “strip” off and on as an adult, home from school, but mainly just to see if I somehow would finally feel like I “fit in” with everyone I had thought was so cool in high school. I never did.
But anyway, I had this bag of pot that would never be rolled or packed or smoked or anything by me, and it felt pretty rebellious and grown-up just to have it in my possession. It’s probably why I agreed to keep it in my book bag. I put it in there right after we bought it, and a day later I went to callbacks for The Shadow Box after school. I really wanted to be Beverly.
The morning after the audition, I was called to security. They had found my book bag outside of the school sitting near a door. I had asked another friend (not Liz) to put my back pack in the greenroom. I guess my friend never got it to the greenroom for me. I hadn’t even noticed, let alone worried. Too excited about the auditions. I never quite understood how my backpack ended up outside the door, and it was never something that really mattered because it felt like that would be looking to blame someone else and it didn’t change what happened.
Security opened the book bag up when they found it, to see who it belonged to, and found the little bag of crappy pot. They already knew what was in it when I got to the office. But for some reason, they pretended they hadn’t gone through the bag. I’ll never understand this and it always makes me uncomfortable. It was like they were playing a game with me. They opened every pocket except for the one holding the little seedy first bag of weed I’d ever bought. They even said, “I guess you can go.” And as I got up, they said, “Oh, wait a minute. We forgot one pocket.” It felt like a nightmare.
While I was being expelled, before being walked through the halls in handcuffs with a police officer, I asked if they could check the cast list for The Shadow Box. One of the security guards did me that bit of kindness and told me I had in fact been cast as Beverly. Sometimes I look back and wonder whether it was good to know or whether it made things more hurtful. I think I like having a small victory during what was such a difficult and humiliating day.
The rest of the day, and truthfully a lot of life at that time, is a bit hazy in my memory. I think it’s because I sort of shut down at the time, and so I was hardly present. So it’s difficult to try to remember what it was like to be there twenty years later when, at the time, I was trying so hard to not be there. I know I was taken to a police station and spent time in a little room (cell?) before my parents arrived. I will always appreciate the way my parents treated the whole thing. They had of course smoked pot in their lifetime and maybe were still partaking around this time. They also knew that school was important to me and I worked hard. So seeing me at the police station that afternoon, still crying, they felt sorry for me instead of angry with me. Of course they weren’t totally okay with smoking weed as a teenager, and I was definitely grounded for a while, but they didn’t punish me much beyond that. I think they also knew I was being punished plenty by the school.
I got out of going to court by agreeing to a program set up for kids in my situation. I realize I am much luckier here than a lot of kids because I grew up white and middle-class. Because I was a minor and the amount of weed was so small, my arrest would be expunged if I agreed to one hundred hours of community service. I spent a big chunk of my summer working at a wonderful community center for HIV-positive residents in my town. They helped to provide assistance with housing, finances, transportation—basically all of the nonmedical concerns of their clients.
I had to take a workshop before I started, and I remember a particularly emotional exercise we did where each of us in the class was given five index cards and told to write down the five most important things in our life: family, education, religion, career, etc. Then we placed the cards facedown and our neighbor removed two of the cards. We were told to pick up the three cards we had remaining. And then the instructor said something like, “You were diagnosed with HIV three months ago. This is what you still have and what you have lost because of your diagnosis.” Then we discussed how we thought we could have lost these important parts of our life. A lot of the workshop was like this. I had certain ideas about the gravity and danger of the medical/physical ramifications of being HIV positive but had not really ever thought about the gravity and dan
ger of the social stigma of being HIV positive.
My job consisted of working in reception and helping to stock the food pantry that was used as a sort of grocery store for the clients. I was also in charge of organizing the various contraception delivered to the center. I remember making piles of flavored condoms, dental dams, magnum condoms, ribbed, you name it. There was always a basket in the front of the office full of condoms for people to freely take. Some local kids found out, of course, and I remember one afternoon a group of about five eleven-to-twelve-year-old boys walking in and giggling while they hovered at the door for a second, before the “bravest” one grabbed a handful and declared, “I’m gonna get some pussy tonight.” I remember my boss, when I mentioned this to her, just sighed and said, “Those have probably all been blown up into balloons by now.” She was cool.
While expelled, I opted out of going to the behavioral disorder school in Chicago that my school so graciously recommended. Instead, I went to Catholic school for a semester. I wasn’t raised Catholic so it was a totally new world for me in a lot of ways. Especially a Catholic school right outside of Chicago. The majority of my classmates seemed to be Italian or Irish girls. I was fascinated by these beautiful long melodic Italian names (I had no idea what a confirmation name was before this) and all of the indoor tanning stories (poor Jo went twice one weekend because she couldn’t say no to her boyfriend Kenny’s mom wanting to take her, and so she burned her butt so badly it hurt sitting that Monday morning we were back in class in our scratchy skirts) and the planner notebooks covered in pictures of boys posing with tough-guy faces and big muscles from the brother school St. Patrick’s (St. P’s).
That semester, I got a letter telling me I was a National Merit Commended Scholar based on the PSAT test I had taken earlier that year at my public school. I would not be able to attend the ceremony at the public school though, as I was not allowed within a three-block radius or, I was told, the police would be called.
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