The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  I didn’t have any cash in my wallet, and the café was cash only. But I had made eight dollars doing The Bride, and I insisted on buying our hot chocolate with those crumpled-up bills, which I fished out of the can I’d used to collect them. The bill for two hot chocolates came to eleven dollars. Fucking New York. Apologizing, I hit Neil up for the rest of the money.

  It’s okay, he said. What you did out there was wonderful.

  Ah, thanks. Yeah. Sorry it got all fucked up. I should have planned the surprise better.

  No, he said. It was perfect. I think it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me, actually.

  What? Really? I said.

  Really. And I’ve decided something.

  What’s that?

  I’ve decided that I’m not going anywhere.

  Sorry. What?

  I’m not going anywhere, he repeated.

  I don’t know what you mean, Neil.

  I mean, he said, speaking more slowly, that I’m not. Going. Anywhere. Even if it takes years. I think I’ll stay right here.

  Like…here at the corner table? I joked nervously. You mean you’re never going to leave Cafe Gitane ever? That sounds very Neil Gaiman-y.

  No, he said, plainly. I’ll leave this café. But I won’t leave you. That’s what I mean. I’m not going anywhere.

  Oh, I said. I see. I think.

  And I couldn’t think of anything to say after that.

  We were both still in other relationships, though it was no secret that they were both foundering.

  We parted ways, and I walked down the street thinking:

  Did what I think just happened actually happen? Does Neil Gaiman, Celebrated Writer Of Fantasy And Science Fiction Novels want to date me? God, he’s so much older than me, I thought, doing the math. Sixteen years. No way. That’s too much. And he’s famous. Which is kind of great but kind of not. And he’s so…awkward and…British…and…I don’t know. He’d hate me and my life and friends.

  We have practically nothing in common, I reasoned. But still, there was something about him. He was so…what was he? He was so…

  …kind.

  Sometimes people—almost always men—would walk up to The Bride and, with dramatic ceremony that ranged from the corny to the sublimely tasteful, offer me their wedding rings.

  I would clasp my heart, saying with my fluttering eyes:

  For meeee?

  And I would touch my fingers to my lips, speechless, shrug my shoulders upwards in extreme delight, smile slightly, take the ring, and slip it lovingly onto my gloved pinky.

  Thank you for this beautiful wedding ring. I love you.

  Then I’d go back to standing still.

  Then things would get kind of awkward.

  The person would want the wedding ring back.

  So we’d stand there, staring at each other.

  I’d shake my head.

  A pause. A really nervous pause.

  Then I’d reconsider, and remove the ring, and start to return it—much to the relief of my new human friend.

  Then I’d change my mind.

  This game could go on for a while if business was slow.

  Despite the fact that the majority of passersby ignored me (and occasionally sent me into spirals of existential despair), I had come to have a sort of faith in the street, and in the general public, because they would instinctively protect me. I was truly vulnerable up there, but I felt a benevolent force field of human energy around me.

  A few times some jerk would grab my money-filled hat and run away with it. But somebody always chased him (and it was always a him) down the street and grabbed the hat back and returned it, often feeling the need to apologize to me, as if to apologize for all of humanity.

  I’d thank them with some flowers. They would take them. They understood.

  One day, while I was surrounded by a small audience, a mentally ill guy approached me and started spitting and screaming at me in a foreign language. Things reached a whole new level of frightening when he reached up and grabbed my frozen, outstretched arm, trying to pull me off my pedestal. My feet were bound by the skirt beneath my dress. If I fell over, I couldn’t break my own fall.

  I didn’t speak or scream, I just looked him right in the eye, as fiercely and imploringly as I could, thinking:

  Please, oh god, please let go of me.

  But he didn’t. Just as I was about to break character and wrestle myself free, someone from the crowd moved in and grabbed the guy, pulling him off me and dragging him a safe distance away. I didn’t break character. I watched the whole scene play out like a movie. The crowd applauded. I gave the Samaritan a flower, pressing my hands together, a gesture of heartfelt gratitude. Then I got back to work.

  A teenage girl once whipped an apple at me from about twenty feet away, just barely missing my face and hitting my collarbone. I kept my balance while one of my friends, who happened to be watching, chased her for three blocks and set her straight.

  Drunk people were always a pain in the ass. Friday and Saturday nights could be lucrative but intolerable. One night, a group of wasted frat boys walked by me and one of them stopped, looked up, grabbed me around my legs, and buried his face in my crotch, making drunkenly ecstatic “yummy” sounds.

  I looked down and shook my head sadly.

  What can you do?

  People made me sad sometimes.

  But mostly I just got sad if they didn’t want the flower.

  One day I really got the shit scared out of me. I heard a car screech up onto the curb behind my pedestal, and a pair of hands grabbed me around the waist from behind. I heard a voice say,

  GET HER!

  And three people dressed in black, wearing ski masks, started to tie my hands together. Another snatched all my milk crates and money. They threw me in the back of a van and the driver revved the engine and pulled away, speeding down Mass Ave. One of the black-clad guys took his mask off, giggling uncontrollably: it was E. Stephen, one of my screwball artist pals, who constructed apocalyptic sculptures and devices out of found objects and dead animals. He kept jars of his own toenail clippings for use in future projects.

  I sighed and looked at him, rolling my eyes.

  Dude…I was WORKING.

  I realize now that I felt chronically guilty about having chosen to be an artist. I didn’t understand this at the time; I just felt a consistent kind of inward torture, pulled towards a life in art while simultaneously feeling foolish for having made that choice. The Fraud Police ate away at me persistently through my twenties; the needling voices simmered below the surface and gnawed at my subconscious in an endless, grating loop:

  When are you going to grow up, get a real job, and stop fucking around?

  What makes you think you deserve to earn money playing your little songs to people?

  What gives you the right to think people should give one shit about your art?

  When are you going to stop being so selfish and start doing something USEFUL, like your Sister the Scientist?

  If you take those questions and turn them into statements, they look like this:

  Artists are not useful.

  Grown-ups are not artists.

  Artists do not deserve to make money from their art.

  “Artist” is not a real job.

  I’ve played in every venue imaginable over the last fifteen years, in fancy old theaters and shitty sports bars, in secret underground piano bars with capacities of forty people, to crowds of thousands in sports arenas.

  But I maintain: no performing-art form can ever achieve the condition of The Eight-Foot Bride.

  It was like breaking down a compound into its essential elements, then down to an atom, then down to an irreducible proton.

  Such profound encounters—like the deeply moving exchanges I’d have with broken people who seemed to have found some sort of salvation in the accidental, beautiful moment of connection with a stranger painted white on a street corner—cannot happen on a safe stage
with a curtain. Magical things can happen there, but not this. The moment of being able to say, unaccompanied by narrative:

  Thank you…I see you.

  In those moments I felt like a genie of compassion, able to pay attention to the hard-to-reach, hidden cracks of someone else’s life—as if I were a specially shaped human-emotion tool that could reach way under the bed of somebody’s dark heart and scrape out the caked-on blackness.

  Just by seeing someone—really seeing them, and being seen in return—you enrealen each other.

  What is possible on the sidewalk is unique. No song needed, no words, no lighting, no story, no ticket, no critic, no context.

  It cannot get any simpler than a painted person on a box, a living human question mark, asking:

  Love?

  And a passing stranger, rattled out of the rhythm of a mundane existence, answering:

  Yes.

  Love.

  It would rain, sometimes.

  If I woke and saw the rain on a vaguely scheduled Statue Day, that meant a day off. I felt deeply in tune with nature—like my distant hunting-and-gathering forebears from ancient Scotland (or wherever my ancient forebears hunted and gathered). New England weather is known for its fickleness, and many days the rain would vanish as quickly as it came.

  Sometimes I’d be up on the box when the rainclouds rolled in. I was usually happy to stay up there in the drizzle, but people were far less likely to stop. Trying to decide when to get down was always an interesting game I played with myself, and sometimes I’d just stay up there and get soaking wet, as some kind of random statement to the Performance Art Gods. I would fix my eyes downwards and watch the bricks on the sidewalk as they discolored with the rainwater, first a smattering of little specks, then lots of dark splotches, and eventually, they’d turn all-dark-red wet. The bridal costume, which I washed only occasionally in the Toscanini’s bathroom sink, would emit an odor that you could smell for miles around.

  Sometimes waiting it out was worth it. The rain would come, then go, the sidewalk would dry and the sun would come out and dry me off, leaving only the faintest trace of Eau de Wet Bride.

  Inviting my friends to watch The Bride was difficult, because there was never any set start or finish time. Just a noncommittal:

  I’ll be Bride-ing in the Square today, probably around fourish.

  Anthony came by one day and set up a chair at the café across the sidewalk, a good thirty feet away. I was so excited he’d come; he could finally see what I was doing. I connected with people especially deeply that day, because I knew he was watching. I wanted him to see the seeing.

  He watched for a long time. After I was finished, we went out for a falafel at Café Algiers, and he reported the conversations he’d overheard.

  This one guy, this regular chess-player type who says he’s there every day, says, “She is the Madonna of Harvard Square.”

  I laughed.

  Then the guy next to him says, “Yeah, and she’s Asian, I think she’s actually Korean.” And another guy leans over and whispers to me, “No word of a lie, she has combat boots on under that dress.”

  I laughed again.

  And another guy tells me, “I’m in love with her.”

  Aww. You know, I said, I think even I’m in love with her. She’s…you know. She’s perfect.

  I looked directly at him.

  So you liked it? You really got it?

  It was magnificent, clown. And I got behind you a couple times, so I could watch those faces, up close, of the people looking at you. I saw the love, the longing, all of it. I mean…it’s the most powerful and basic of all things. You were right. It’s the human encounter, all happening right there, beauty. And when that little kid came up, the scared one? Oof. I almost cried.

  You almost cried? For real?

  I almost cried, he said.

  I WIN! I said.

  You win. How do you feel?

  LIKE A MILLION DOLLARS.

  What you’re doing up there is art, my girl. You’re really doing it. I’m proud of you.

  He paid the check. He always paid the check.

  So I’d done it, sort of.

  I felt like A Productive Member Of Society in my own weird way, a Real Artist.

  But honestly? I didn’t want to be a statue. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be vulnerable. Not as a character, but as myself.

  Facing the street as a statue had its challenges, but truthfully, it all felt like cheating, because I wasn’t actually showing myself. I was hiding behind a blank, white wall.

  I loved the connecting. I loved the seeing. But it wasn’t enough. People loved The Bride because she was perfect and silent.

  Anyone.

  I wanted to be loved for my songwriting, the musical dot-connection I’d been privately plugging away at for years, which showed me for what I actually was.

  Imperfect.

  And very, very loud.

  GIRL ANACHRONISM

  You can tell

  From the scars on my arms

  And the cracks in my hips

  And the dents in my car

  And the blisters on my lips

  That I’m not the carefulest of girls

  You can tell

  From the glass on the floor

  And the strings that are breaking

  And I keep on breaking more

  And it looks like I am shaking

  But it’s just the temperature

  Then again

  If it were any colder I could disengage

  If I were any older I would act my age

  But I don’t think that you’d believe me

  It’s

  Not

  The

  Way

  I’m

  Meant

  To

  Be

  It’s just the way the operation made me

  And you can tell

  From the state of my room

  That they let me out too soon

  And the pills that I ate

  Came a couple years too late

  And I’ve got some issues to work through

  There I go again

  Pretending to be you

  Make-believing

  That I have a soul beneath the surface

  Trying to convince you

  It was accidentally on purpose

  I am not so serious

  This passion is a plagiarism

  I might join your century

  But only on a rare occasion

  I was taken out

  Before the labor pains set in and now

  Behold the world’s worst accident

  I am the girl anachronism

  And you can tell

  From the red in my eyes

  And the bruises on my thighs

  And the knots in my hair

  And the bathtub full of flies

  That I’m not right now at all

  There I go again

  Pretending that I’ll fall

  Don’t call the doctors

  Cause they’ve seen it all before

  They’ll say just

  Let

  Her

  Crash

  And

  Burn

  She’ll learn

  The attention just encourages her

  And you can tell

  From the full-body cast

  That you’re sorry that you asked

  Though you did everything you could

  (Like any decent person would)

  But I might be catching so don’t touch

  You’ll start believing you’re immune to gravity and stuff

  Don’t get me wet

  Because the bandages will all come off

  You can tell

  From the smoke at the stake

  That the current state is critical

  Well it is the little things, for instance

  In the time it takes to break it she can make up ten excuses

  Please excuse her for the d
ay, it’s just the way the

  Medication makes her

  I don’t necessarily believe there is a cure for this

  So I might join your century but only as a doubtful guest

  I was too precarious removed as a caesarian

  Behold the world’s worst accident

  I AM THE GIRL ANACHRONISM

  —from The Dresden Dolls, 2003

  So I started a band.

  And we were loud.

  We had no guitars; it was just me on the piano and the microphone and Brian Viglione, who stumbled into my life like a long-lost musical soul-twin, on the drums. Our minimal setup didn’t limit our sonic power in the slightest: the drums alone deafened people, and I cranked my electronic piano to match. Brian had been reared on a steady diet of metal, jazz, and hardcore punk, and he hit the drums like a smoke-choked victim pounding on the exit door of a burning building; for him, commitment to the religion of drumming was his gateway to redemption. And I played piano the same way, seeking salvation through volume.

  I met Brian during a Halloween party I threw at the Cloud Club. A few hundred people in costume were packed into the house, roving around all four floors. I’d been so busy organizing the party that I’d taken the lazy route and dressed as a temporary office worker in the two-piece suit my mother had insisted on buying me “for job interviews,” which had been stuffed in a paper bag unironically marked “grown-up clothes” in the back of my closet for more than four years. Brian came as a severed head, dressed all in black with convincing-looking blood oozing down his neck.

  Late that night, on the ancient upright piano, I played and sang four of my closeted songs to a small, drunk crowd of friends. Brian took me aside and declared: I am destined to be your drummer. I didn’t argue. I’d been trying to start a band and was heading towards my twenty-fifth birthday, the deadline I’d superstitiously given myself to get my musical shit together or else face the inevitability of being a Total Failure.

  We formed the band a week later and called ourselves The Dresden Dolls, in a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse-Five and the innocent, delicate porcelain figurines I always imagined strewn under the rubble of the decimated city. Dark, light, dark. That was us.