I was thirteen, and our relationship had evolved from occasional next-door-neighbor snowball enemies to full-on pals. He claims we were standing in his driveway and something had happened that merited An Actual Hug.
But we had never hugged, and I was, according to him, interested in the idea, but wasn’t used to hugging. So I leaned my body against his, he says, like a slowly falling pine tree, letting my head rest on his chest while the rest of my body kept a terrified distance.
Anthony and Laura didn’t have children, and I was gradually spiritually adopted. Anthony was a professional therapist, and a good listener. I desperately needed someone to listen. And once I’d unloaded all my teenage pain on him, he knew the way to win my trust. He never told me what to do.
Instead, he told me stories.
Stories about his life, stories about Zen masters, stories about his grandfather.
Here’s one of my favorites.
A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out.
A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.
“What’s that terrifyin’ sound?” asks the friend.
“It’s my dog,” said the farmer. “He’s sittin’ on a nail.”
“Why doesn’t he just sit up and get off it?” asks the friend.
The farmer deliberates on this and replies:
“Doesn’t hurt enough yet.”
Through the years, Anthony would tell me this one whenever I was suffering from particularly bad bouts of self-destructiveness. Those were pre-cell-phone days, and I used to call him from the dorm, from my squalid sublets, from boyfriends’ apartments, and collect from pay phones all over Europe the year I backpacked and studied abroad. I’d leave messages that filled his answering machine and mail him typewritten letters that were too long to stuff into an envelope without bursting the seams.
WHY DO I KEEP DOING THESE THINGS TO MYSELF? I’d ask him, moaning about my latest killer hangover, brush with death, lost wallet, or on-again-off-again relationship with the latest drug-abusing (but really good-looking) boyfriend.
I could hear him smiling through the phone.
Ah, beauty. Doesn’t hurt enough yet.
I’ve had a problem feeling real all my life.
I didn’t know until recently how absolutely universal that feeling is. For a long time, I thought I was alone. Psychologists have a term for it: imposter syndrome. But before I knew that phrase existed, I coined my own: The Fraud Police.
The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:
We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.
I mentioned The Fraud Police during a commencement speech I recently gave at an arts college, and I asked the adults in the room, including the faculty, to raise their hands if they’d ever had this feeling. I don’t think a single hand stayed down.
People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.
There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.
When you’ve “made it” in academia, you become a tenured professor. It’s official. Most of the time, though, “outside” appointment and approval (Congratulations! You’re an official Professor/CEO/President/etc.) in any field doesn’t necessarily silence The Fraud Police. In fact, outside approval can make The Fraud Police louder: it’s more like fighting them in high court instead of in a back alley with your fists. Along with all the layers of official titles and responsibilities come even deeper, scarier layers of oh fuck they’re gonna find me out.
I can imagine a seasoned brain surgeon, in the moment before that first incision, having that teeny moment where she thinks:
For real? I dropped my cell phone in a puddle this morning, couldn’t find my keys, can’t hold down a relationship, and here I am clutching a sharp knife about to cut someone’s head open. And they could die. Who is letting me do this? This is BULLSHIT.
Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.
In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple:
The professionals know they’re winging it.
The amateurs pretend they’re not.
On an average day, working two bouquets of flowers, I could make over a hundred dollars. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it was certainly more than the $9.50 an hour I was earning at Toscanini’s.
The consistency of the income really did amaze me. If the weather held, I could count on making about $40 to $50 an hour from random people walking by and making random decisions to give me a random amount of money.
How was it possible that it was so predictable? That’s a question for the economists, I suppose. When I asked my Twitter followers about this, and the statisticians started weighing in about entropic probabilistic synchronicity, I gave up and settled on a simpler theory:
Given the opportunity, some small consistent portion of the population will happily pay for art.
Sometimes, up on the box, I would fall in love with people. Pretty often, come to think of it. It was easy, given how safe and swaddled I was up there in my cloud of pretty, white, untouchable stillness. No commitment. Just this, just now, just us.
Occasionally one of the more broken-looking homeless people of Harvard Square would approach me, drop a dollar in, and I would offer my flower. We’d look at each other, and sometimes their faces would crumple and tears would appear.
Hi.
I see you there.
I can’t believe you just gave me a dollar.
You probably need it more than me.
I’ve been watching you circle the plaza all day asking people for money and I hope to god you know that you and I are, in this moment, exactly the same.
I never felt guilty about those dollars, though, because there was such a beauty and humanity in the fact that these homeless people were, right along with the rich tourists, stopping to connect with me. They saw value in what I was doing. They saw the power and necessity of the human connection.
Was it fair? I don’t know. It felt fair.
There was something conspiratorial about it; their money felt symbolically valuable to me in a way that made me swell with pride—they approved of me, and their approval somehow meant more to me than anybody else’s.
I started to realize there was a subterranean financial ecosystem in Harvard Square involving all of us street freaks. I found it impossible to pass the other street performers—a revolving cast of puppeteers and musicians, jugglers and magicians—or the homeless folk, without giving them my own dollars, sometimes dollars from my own hat that I’d been given just minutes before. The gift circulated.
One day a really old, raggedy-looking Japanese guy watched me for a very long time.
He made himself a little perch on one of the cement benches across the sidewalk, surrounded by rolled-up sleeping bags and a colorless, tattered collection of garbage sacks, and sat there, looking at me with his weathered face. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. After about an hour, he dug into his pocket and fished
out a dollar, and he shuffled over to me, put the dollar in my hat, and looked up.
Here’s your flower.
I see you.
His eyes narrowed, and he looked at my face, like he was looking for the answer to a question that I couldn’t hear him asking, and I just stared right back. And then he nodded slightly, took the flower, and shuffled away. I loved him.
The next day he came back and left a note in the hat.
He wanted to know if I would marry him.
I don’t know how he expected me to answer.
I never saw him again.
I wanted to be seen.
That was absolutely true. All performers—all humans—want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at.
But I also wanted, very much, to see.
I didn’t quite grasp this until I had been up on the box for a while. What I loved as much as, possibly even more than, being seen was sharing the gaze. Feeling connected.
I needed the two-way street, the exchange, the relationship, and the invitation to true intimacy that I got every so often from the eyes of my random street patrons. It didn’t always happen. But it happened enough to keep me up on the box.
And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection. There was physical intimacy galore: I witnessed hand jobs being given under tables,2 and lots of legs and tits and more being covertly rubbed at the bar. I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (from which I earned a 15 percent cut) that was purchased for me on a good night by lonely men who wanted to chat, I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead.
Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name):
It’s hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts
Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts
People would look straight into your crotch.
But nobody would look you in the eye.
And that drove me crazy.
Sometimes people would hold my gaze and try to give the flower back to The Bride, as if to somehow repay me for the flower I had just given them.
And I would gesture:
No no, it’s yours to keep.
A few times people came back to my spot, fifteen minutes later, to lay a whole store-bought bouquet at my feet. Some people would pick flowers or rhododendron stems from Harvard Yard and hand me their gift, and then I’d give them one of my flowers, and we’d keep trading, and it would all get really funny and confusing.
On a good day, I couldn’t tell who was giving what to whom.
Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.
The surgeon knows that her work is creative work. A machine can’t do it because it requires human delicacy and decision making. It can’t be done by an automaton because it requires critical thinking and a good dose of winging-it-ness. Her work requires a balance of self-confidence and collaboration, a blend of intuition and improvisation.
If the surgeon, while slicing that vulnerable brain, hits an unexpected bump in the process and needs to ask the person beside her for something essential—and quickly—she has absolutely no time to waste on questions like:
Do I deserve to ask for this help?
Is this person I’m asking really trustworthy?
Am I an asshole for having the power to ask in this moment?
She simply accepts her position, asks without shame, gets the right scalpel, and keeps cutting. Something larger is at stake. This holds true for firefighters, airline pilots, and lifeguards, but it also holds true for artists, scientists, teachers—for anyone, in any relationship.
Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world.
Asking for help with shame says:
You have the power over me.
Asking with condescension says:
I have the power over you.
But asking for help with gratitude says:
We have the power to help each other.
Sometimes I had to sneeze. Statues should not sneeze. It became a dramatic internal activity: I’d spend an entire minute just concentrating on the feeling in my throat and nose, playing with the strange twilight zone of sneeze-not-sneeze.
And sometimes I’d just fucking sneeze. Nothing to be done.
It was a formidable Zen practice.
Sometimes a mosquito or a fly or a bee would land on my cheek, and we’d just sort of hang out together.
Sometimes the sun would beat down directly on my face and a bead of sweat would cling to the tip of my nose until it got fat enough to start dripping into the street.
Sometimes I’d have to wipe my nose because I had a cold. Or because it was cold.
I would be so freezing sometimes that I would hyperextend the dance of flower-giving and draw out the entire gesture arduously, so some poor person would wait there patiently for minutes while I enacted a bizarre-looking, overdramatic, avant-garde modern dance, trying to warm up my body.
This would culminate in the eventual giving of the flower and a climactic flourish in which, with my gloved hand, and as subtly as possible, I could also wipe away the long, graceful string of clear snot that was hanging out of my white-painted nose.
The art of asking can be learned, studied, perfected. The masters of asking, like the masters of painting and music, know that the field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.
Which is to say: there are no rules.
Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken.
Gus, our boss at Toscanini’s Ice Cream, was a true patron of the arts—a perfect example of the sort of person who lives a life committed to the creativity of patronage, and expands the boundaries of what we are empowered to give one another.
He was a beloved local Celebrity Ice Cream Chef, obsessively passionate about music, culture, Cambridge politics, and new frontiers in frozen dessert making. He would devise, like an inspired mad scientist, ice creams and sorbets made out of pink peppercorns, basil, and beer.
Gus was an avid connector: He printed information about local dance companies on the store’s takeaway coffee cups. He gave away crates of ice cream to science activists from MIT. He provided ice-cream gift certificates to silent auctions to rebuild city parks. He was like an ice-cream Santa Claus. It was almost a rite of passage for a young indie musician in Boston to work at either Toscanini’s or Pearl Art & Craft (the other flexible-schedule job in Cambridge that didn’t consider it a customer service liability to rock a blue Mohawk behind the counter).
Even though I’d hit the jackpot with my newfound hundred-dollar-a-day street-performance career, I still needed a place to store my bridal rig. Carting it back and forth between my crappy apartment and the store would have been impossible. So I kept one weekly shift at the ice-cream shop, plucked up my courage, and casually asked Gus:
Um, do you mind if I keep my bride stuff in the basement? It’s just a couple of milk crates and some clothes and makeup and stuff.
Sure! said Gus, cheerfully. You can store the creepy bride down there. (That’s what he called her.) Don’t scare the customers.
The basement of T
oscanini’s was an ancient, dank cave with a low-slung ceiling tangled in pipes and a brick-and-dirt floor, crammed with cardboard boxes containing cups, spoons, and napkins. There was a tiny employees-only bathroom and a huge walk-in freezer where the five-gallon ice-cream tubs were kept. (That walk-in freezer became a very handy subzero reverse-sauna after a long, hot day statue-ing in the sun, and I’d often freak the bejeezus out of employees who accidentally stumbled upon me hanging out in there, naked, when they came in to restock tubs of French Vanilla.)
I got the entire bridal transformation down to about nine minutes: I’d sit down on the toilet in the basement, powder-whiten my face, pull the wedding dress over my jeans and boots, tuck my hair into a wig cap, and arrange the veil atop my head with a mess of bobby pins. Then I’d pull on the long white gloves, gather up my crates and giant train of gown into my arms, ascend the basement stairs, exchange salutes with my co-workers behind the counter, and bask in the what-the-fuck expressions on the faces of the ice-cream customers as I passed through the shop like a Dickensian hallucination and headed out onto the street.
All I have to say is: thank Christ I didn’t work at Baskin-Robbins.
My boyfriend Joseph would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He was an actor.
He would hang back for a while, then ceremoniously put his dollar into the hat with a flourish, and look deep into my eyes while I dramatically picked out his flower. Then I would gesture to him, as the crowd watched, curious about this stranger who was getting extra attention. I would gesture to him to come closer, then coyly withhold my flower. People would laugh, and I would gesture to him to come right up to my face, then I’d kiss him, slowly, on the lips, and then tuck the flower in his hair.
The crowd always went wild with affectionate sounds. I loved that they didn’t know anything.
The Art of Asking Page 5