In Which We Apply A Layer Of The Substance To Our Skin Before Bedtime

I Wrote This By Hand

by LISA GETTY-FRANCIS

Monday

He is riding the 2 train and getting off four stops before mine. He has that glazed over look. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Tuesday

I think of the right book to be reading, the one that not only piques his interest, but piques his interest in me. My roommate Joann suggests a novelization of the Jim Carrey movie The Cable Guy. My mom suggests a book about training puppies written by a bunch of a monks. "He'll know, on some level, that it is about him," she says without a trace of irony.

Wednesday

Irony is the only thing never in short supply. He is reading now. Well, he is playing a game on his phone also. The object of the game, I can reveal to you all now, is to put a series of frames in sequential order.

When he becomes frustrated or unable to put them in the right order, he pulls out a book. It is a rather tawdry biography of Johnny Carson, who never trusted anyone.

Thursday

I decide on a book that will suggest a variety of nuances about myself. You don't know me, but I am like a parade: you can have brief snippets of fun, but you can also be trampled.

Friday

I notice that when he is reading, his mouth forms some but not all of the words. My roommate Joann says that he is probably learning disabled. My mom says a lot of people do that when they read, which is code for her saying she has been known to mouth a word here or there.

Saturday

I went to the Met. All the paintings seemed woefully inadequate. Why didn't they talk, or dance? Remaining still is only useful in death.

Monday

OK. I have heard his voice. It sounds like when someone who is a bit too much up his own ass says the word 'research.' He talked to a latino girl who admired his shoes (they are gorgeous, they should be in a museum). He told her that they do not feel as good as they look, and turned back to his new book: a paperback copy of Rosemary's Baby. I am ashamed to say I was a little turned on by that.

Tuesday

Some ducks climbed up on an old woman's leg in the park. She was feeding them too much. When they reached for her hand, she said she had to go.

Wednesday

My roommate invited me to the Hamptons, but I can't/don't want to go. The faces of the people there remind me too much of scars.

Thursday

He wore his workout clothes around five, which suggests that he changed into them at the office. He is quite fit, but his arrangement suggests an almost accidental theme. He took out a gym bag and changed his shoes. I would be lying if I said they looked great, but the last time I looked at a pair of feet and felt pleased was in the shower.

Friday

Look-alikes:

Me, Audrey Hepburn's mediocre sister
My mom, Katie Couric
Him, An incredibly handsome velociraptor
Joann, a female birthed from Channing Tatum's embryo

The possibility of being someone else is the rabbit dogs chase around the Aqueduct.

Monday

What a weekend. I did not see him once, and I rode the subway back and forth too much. It used to be that the very first car was always the emptiest, but people caught on, and now it is as crowded as the others. Then a train crashed in Valhalla, and it was only those in the first car who perished in the flames. It goes back and forth like that.

Tuesday

He is back! On an impulse I sat down next to him. He looked up at me and smiled! He was reading The Interestings! (What crap!) I searched for what I would say, and it did not take me very long to come up with something that I believe we can all agree is compelling on the merits: "I'm Lisa. You are? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know."

Wednesday

Joann made me go to the Guggenheim. It is like being inside an egg, which leads to us spending most of our time there reading the wikipedia article about eggs. We need something to distract us because the Kandinsky exhibit is so bad.

Joann thinks it is best not to overthink a first date. "A great first date sets up too many unrealistic expectations," she says. She also believes you should always drink on a first date, as a sort of litmus test to find out if he is an alcoholic. Her last boyfriend drank too much, and his skin smelled like Crown Royal Apple.

Thursday

The date is on Saturday, so I just take the bus until then. Buses are full of divorced dads with their kids and seniors wrapping their wrists in gauze. Someone had the not-so-bright idea to put fabric on the seats instead of plastic, and it is all worn down and discolored, like hair dyed too many colors. When someone (a male) first asked me to describe myself, I found I could not do it. Since then I have put some real time into knowing what to say in response to that question. This makes it seem like I know who I am.

Friday

Joann and I cleaned the apartment today. We found three twenty dollar bills in the sofa cushion and paused the mopping for a real meal. She thinks they belonged to her ex-boyfriend. "Don't date a guy who is always losing things," she said. "It's a waste of time." I almost tell her that I lost a pair of earrings she gave me last year, but I decide to wait for a better time. They are probably on the first car of a train somewhere.

Saturday

How did it go? How did it go? How did it go?

He was working in Rhode Island, he tells me. He says the explanation is going to sound weird, and I don a solemn countenance, preparing myself to say, "But that's not weird at all!" (In this restaurant, all the flames shine in candleholders shaped like golden retrievers.)

He (his name is Jeffrey) was in charge of all the lost and found in the entire state of Rhode Island. It was a job his uncle got him after he dropped out of law school, he says. I ask him what things people lost that were recovered.

"Oh anything," he says, and launches into a list that it feels like goes on for the better part of an hour. Honestly I mostly start touching him just to quiet the barrage, but also because I always wanted to.

"I saw you on the train a few weeks ago," I say.

"What made you notice me?"

"Oh, you were reading some trash."

Saturday

His apartment is more meticulously arranged than any museum. I used to like going to those places, the kinds of empty environments you could fill with your own thoughts and turn into a completely idiosyncratic experience. I think that possibility has vanished or is at least seriously diminished. (My youth!)

He applies a full layer of cocoa butter to his body before sleep.

Sunday

An arm and a leg.

Joann met someone, too. His hair is short but oddly covers his ears. She sent me a picture. I asked if he moves his mouth to form the words he is reading, and she says so far, no, but the only books in his apartment are by Jacques Pepin and Foucault.

Monday

In the last car, where you are the least likely to run into anyone you know, a chorus sings, "I Think We're Alone Now." The train breaks down at 96th.

Lisa Getty-Francis is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York.

"I Feel The Weight" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Back of the Car" - Miike Snow (mp3)

In Which She Is Still Not Sure

How To Think About Quitting New York

by SARAH SALOVAARA

I hadn’t washed my hair in five days. My brush sat at the bottom of my backpack, beneath DVDs and magazines (yes, those old things), untouched. I had just returned from North Carolina, the suburban, Southern, Disneyland-for-beer-guzzling-beachgoers sprawl known as the Outerbanks. OBX if you’re nasty. 

+

At 2:30 a.m. on July 4th, I awoke as we entered the mini-golf strip. I discovered that sleep — at first feigning it, then committing — was the only viable way I could silence my cab driver who immediately deemed me an ungrateful brat as I slide into his backseat. I told him my father had rescinded my ride from New York, and I was left to scramble, at my mother’s insistence, for flights that night. Be grateful, he told me.

He spoke from a place of Reason and Experience. His children did not speak to him. Didn’t call him on Father’s day. Not even his Birthday. And it was all because of his damn ex-wife — the German-Italian — who gave a child up for adoption when she was sixteen, years before they were together, but never told him about it, as if that was the source of all their problems. He cheated on her constantly, but that was beside the point. He’d never been to New York, but knew he could make it there anyway because he was a Hustler. A vet, but a Hustler, nonetheless. There was something in there about his illiterate mother with a 10th grade education, before I zipped my eyes shut, the words raining out of his mouth like white noise.

+

It is acceptable to not wash or tame your hair when you are in the vicinity of the ocean because, no matter the time of day, you could have just come from the beach. There are only so many inland areas where it is still okay to wear a beaver’s dam atop your skull. New York is one of those places.

+

“How was Connecticut?” I turned from the dinner table as my roommate bound through the front door, Whole Foods bags weighing heavy on her wrists.

“It was great! It just made me realize how much New York sucks.”

“Mmmm,” my dinner companion nodded.

“Lately, I’ve been feeling so stifled, and unable to create things and I just realized I kind of hate it here.”

My friend’s head still bowing in thanks.

“All there is is culture, and I can’t respond to that. I’m so uninspired. Maybe I’ll move.”

I stared at my friend. Unblinking.

“What?” she said. “You don’t want to stay here, either.”

+ 

I say this with equal parts self-loathing and self-awareness, but I am something of an anomaly, in that New York is considered my “comfort zone.” I grew up here, my family still lives here, a handful of my childhood friends do as well. In short, I have a safety net; where others are met with the stomach churning excitement of the expansive unknown, I have familiarity that masquerades as something much greater in its constant evolution. New York is not supposed to intimidate me. I am supposed to love it. Supposed to not want for anything more. It is my home. My hometown. I can say that, and I get to mean it. I have license, because it is, honest and true, all I’ve never known.

But I never say it. And even when my heart catches in my throat, and I find myself filled with such warmth for my surroundings even in the midst of Times Square — and no, it’s not whatever’s wafting from the grates or that Nuts For Nuts cart — it’s fleeting just the same. It’s a reminder, not some cherished, divine intervention.

+

At night on July 4th, we gather at one of the beach houses to watch old Super 8 videos of my grandmother and her family. “This is so Stories We Tell IRL,” I want to say to my second cousin, once removed. We — all 65 or so of us — watch as my grandmother and great uncle dash along the same shores that sit just beyond the bay windows some seventy years prior. There are no houses on the horizon, just sand dunes. I can read her lips as she tugs at the edges of her brother’s face, briefly suspending the rapidity of the frame. Smile she says. It’s a universal gesture. Corny music plays over intermittent PowerPoint slides. It is so bad I have already barred it from memory.

It stops and I remove my arm from my grandmother’s back and offer to demonstrate Eskimo kisses with a distant little girl who will point her finger at me, accusatorily, and shout, “You’re friendly!” 

+

That morning, before any of my cousins are awake, I go out to the porch that overlooks the road. I don’t mind, like my mother and uncle do, that we are not directly on the beach. I write a story. It is the first time I have written a story since college, and it is fantastic.

+

“Wait!” My mother’s cousin — “Crazy Cousin Elizabeth,” as she is widely recognized — pipes up from before the television, 8 dollar bottles of Cabernet coursing through her veins. “We’re gonna show pictures of the farm!”

+

I remember visiting Crazy Cousin Elizabeth, for an afternoon, when I looked at Middlebury. I can’t recall much about her farm — generic details aside — because when I arrived on the campus, I was stopped and interviewed by a local news crew, which was obviously the chief takeaway of the trip for any insecure, narcissistic teenager. I remember what I was wearing. Head to toe.

+

The farm is beautiful. Really picturesque and alluring. There are fruits and vegetables, but also horses. And CCE, it must be said, knows how to wield a camera.

“That’s one of the WWOOFers,” she narrates.

“Elizabeth!” I gargle my G&T. “I WWOOFed!”

“Really?”

The slideshow stops. It is the two of us, calling after each other, halfway across the cramped room.

“Yes! Outside of Nashville! I loved it!”

“Well, you have to come visit me!”

“6 am to 3 pm?” I recall the working hours, readily eclipsed by the 3 o’clock marijuana haze that was more punctual than any agricultural ritual I undertook.

“We do morning till about 1 usually, because it gets too hot, and then we eat lunch, and go back out around 4 for a couple more hours.”

“Ah.”

“I mean it.”

“We’ll talk.”

I turn my eyes back up to the screen, embarrassed, or at least feeling like I should be.

Once we’ve returned to the first photo, Elizabeth shoots up and beelines for me. She throws her arm around my shoulder and turns me away from the circle. We pace, thick as thieves. She tells me all about Slow Food, and permaculture, and how excited she is I’m going to stay with her. She can pick me up from the train station. Anytime.

I come back from the bathroom and greet another relative who I haven’t seen in eight or so years. The only thing I remember about him is his name. “So,” he smiles, “Liz tells me you’re going to spend some time up at her farm.” 

I need to find my great uncle to tell him what time I want to go on his sailboat tomorrow, but he is gone, and I don’t know which house he is in. Elizabeth offers to take me to him, and I resist, because I don’t want her to pressure me into committing to something I’m not ready for. I need to focus on work, not distractions. We walk and she doesn’t mention the farm once.

+

I have always threatened to leave New York. If not to myself, than to my mother, or a close friend. I was definitely going to move to LA after graduation. Then it was Berlin. San Francisco, too.

“I am going to be away from New York for a while,” I email my best friend, drunk, from my apartment in Baltimore. “I can feel it. But, please, remember, that no matter where I am, I am always thinking of you, and always loving you.” 

I think about what I always say whenever someone asks me about Baltimore. How grateful, how lucky I was to go to school there. I love the city beyond words, but it is a place I never would have dreamed of living in otherwise. I am ready to say this about another city, for another reason. It is not, I state, healthy to live in New York all one’s life. 

My best friend now lives with her boyfriend in Boston, and I, in my entire post-graduate year, have not left New York for more than a week at a time.

+

July 5th. Again up early, getting some productivity in, before I go to the beach to socialize. I read the story again. Tweak a word or two. Still fantastic.

+

It had to be New York, because it couldn’t be Los Angeles. I was going to work in film, so it’s either one of the two. In New York, people are passionate about film like I am. In Los Angeles, it is alternative means of investment banking, I instruct, to myself and whomever will listen, again and again.

Perhaps, I thought back in February, I will pick up and go somewhere else once my job is done in March. But March came, and I felt like I had to at least try and capitalize on any opportunities that arose.

+

“Traveling is the worst thing you can do when you lack stability,” my friend tells me. “Because no matter where you go, you will still be wishing you were at home working, advancing. You can distract yourself, but your true aims won’t go away.” I listen to her, but don’t know if I agree.

+

We are picking crabs and a round of relatives trickles in to say their goodbyes. They have early flights, dates with the road at ungodly hours. I speak to yet another second cousin. We are both 22, and I have memories of us being very close at a young age. He has just quit his job at a production company in LA and is moving to Patagonia to work as a ranch hand. He is going to write for two hours everyday. His old professor is married to an editor at The Atlantic, so who knows. The old bay stings my eyes. I am green with envy. 

He hands me his phone and I send myself an e-mail. I write “Relativez” in the subject line, and nothing else.

Later, I touch his mom’s shoulder and tell her how awesome — honest — it is that she supports him. “Well,” she admits, “It took us a while.” I feel better, but only just.

+

At some point recently, film lost its hold on me. The blinders that tell me I won’t be happy unless I am working within the industry are receding, and I am unable to edit a film I shot. My ex-boyfriend is doing it instead.

The funny part is, I know exactly why it happened. And it’s impossible to convince you that it isn’t trivial. I fell in love with someone who ditched film for the environment. I hung on every word that was preached about working outside yourself, engaging the bigger picture. It was subconscious at first, then, insidious.

I felt myself returning to writing. Not scripts, but essays. Long form. At least once a day. And reading. Reading nonstop. The irony here, you say, is that being a writer is not any less self-involved than being a filmmaker, and you are right. But I can’t seem to help it. I have always oscillated between the two, and perhaps eventually, I will accept that I can do both, but that requires placing passion beneath time management.

Though for now, that reality, that you don’t need to live in New York to write like you might need to in order to do film, strikes me on the shoulder more often than not.

+ 

My other roommate walks in the door with her boyfriend. They too have just returned from Connecticut, from her parents’ house.

“I didn’t want to come back. I need to leave New York,” she also announces, but with faulty conviction. “It’s just talking to all of my friends, you realize how much you sacrifice to live here, and that most of the time, it’s not even worth it. My friend just moved to Providence, and bought a car. And not because she has buckets of money, but because she can.”

“No, no, no,” her boyfriend, ever the optimist, says from the couch. “We leave New York after we’ve established ourselves. After we’ve succeeded.”

+

Last week, the two of us, my roommate’s boyfriend and I, were talking about one of his friends who recently left the city to return home. “I hate so much,” he told me, “How it’s never, ‘Oh, well, Billy just realized he liked Detroit better.’ The narrative is always, ‘He couldn’t handle New York.’”

It is, isn’t it? We are always overwhelmed by the city, never under. It is greater than us. Either adapt, acclimate to its dictations, or forfeit.

Would I be part of that narrative? Could I? Or do I get a free pass, again, because I’m from here?

+

We leave North Carolina at 6:30 a.m. and I’m sad. Sad because I know I’m going to return to New York and sit on my couch and write, day in, day out, indoors. Not in plain air, on a porch, a stone’s throw from the sea.

I call my mother and ask for Elizabeth’s email. I don’t have work the coming week. I decide I am going to go up to Vermont and help on the farm and write. I am going to take a break, and think about whether or not I’m going to stay, like I told my roommates I would, when my lease is up in August. If I have the courage to leave New York.

I go to Vermont and it is wonderful. Just what I needed. I sweat all day, and then at night, I sit around the table and talk with strangers and have eye-opening conversations. Then I go to my room and I write, and it’s great, too. I am learning things. About the environment, about sustainability.

+

Of course, none of this actually happens. Instead, I take a break from the couch and get in the shower. I use half a bottle of conditioner on my dreading ends. I wonder if all my hesitancy is as ephemeral as my love of my life and this city. I write this essay. I am still not sure.

Sarah Salovaara is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs about film here, and you can find her twitter here.

"Sarah O'Sarah" - The Darkness (mp3)

In Which We Attempt To Get To Higher Ground

Re: The Lists

by KENZIE BRYANT

These are things that happened: He went away and had an experience. Let’s call it a big experience. So when he came home, he packed and left again.

This is how he packed: He separated his belongings into what to keep and what to sell.

These are things that he’s keeping: Some of his clothes, bags to pack things in, some notebooks, meds, sentimentals and essentials.

These are the things he’s selling: a pair of brown dress shoes, a chocolate bunny, a fruit rollup, several pairs of pants, nedi pots that he got for free thanks to some incongruity on the internet, one earphone, a hat he found, a digital camera, a video camera, a camera camera, a trash can that will presumably be emptied, a chest of drawers, Q-tips, ethernet cords, Christmas lights, a lamp, a TV, a semi-functional but fully bumber-stickered laptop, a DVD player, a roll of fancy film tape, a hookah and seven rolls of coals we rooted out of a garbage bin outside of a storage center in Queens, shoe polish, some cords, glow sticks, a box of wet-naps, a bobble-head President Obama, a disco ball, and books.

He put each individual picture up on Craigslist along with a sales gag (“Christmas Lights: Make it Christmas ALL THE TIME. All your friends will be all like, ‘Is Santa here? This place is the jolliest’” and “Q-Tips: Tampons of the ear. Get them while they're not thrown out or given to my roommate”) and joked that he expected to get messages from concerned friends and strangers that’ll conclude with suicide hotline referrals.

These are the ways that he left: When I kissed him, partly freed by the decision we had made and partly just trying to quench my shit before everything went dry, I tasted him for the first time again, but when I opened my eyes, his were 2,000 miles away. In Colorado, maybe, or Wyoming. I told him he had dead eyes.

My purple toothbrush, which he bought months ago so I would have one when I stayed over, stood alone in the toothbrush stand. He had been back at his apartment for three days.

He said he was sorry.

I was sorry too. I did the requisite shower cry after we’d spent the night launching clichés at each other, trying to make the other feel more. The cry was kind where you don’t want to be in the shower anymore but can’t imagine getting out of it and having to hear the degree of your misery measured in pitch. I held the tiled wall, washed my face, and got out. I went to his room and took the towel from my body and wrapped it around my head, then continued to cry. Surrounded not by him, but by his “save” pile and the “discard” pile, the posters on his wall, pictures, et al., I let the sobs shake as I went to the window and fingered the initials E.T.W—probably his grandfather’s — imprinted on a leather box. I stared out the glass, through a screen to the wall across the ally. I even said out loud, why is everything created to make us believe in lasting love? Artists and copywriters are assholes, except it came out, why...why...do they doooo that? Asses. Then I got dressed and blew snot rockets into the trash.

After a relationship is over, and especially if that relationship was a mutually good one, the dam that you define yourself against breaks down and the rest of the world comes flooding in. The only survival tactic I knew was to get to high ground and let it come. So I went to the park in Sunset Park for the sunset, allowing myself the torrent of the sentimental and the sincere, unfiltered. This is the flood:

Everyone was happy on top of the hill. Even the children were, and the most genuinely unhappy people I’ve ever met are children.

The book I read, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wouldn’t let up. This wasn’t a hard one, since every word feels like tripping on a rock and falling into understanding. But I was absolutely sure I was getting it wrong, superimposing my own mental state over the philosophical whose-its and whats-its allowed by Czechoslovakian repression by a totalitarian regime a long time ago. I wasn’t trying not to.

There were butterflies. One landed on my foot. That wasn’t even fair.

The wind got me good. One day when I was ten, I went into my backyard on some errand for my mother, and as I was going back inside, I looked at the wind blowing through the trees that were the woods that were my everything as a kid. I said to God, “Blow through the trees again if you exist.” It was probably a Sunday and I had probably just gotten home from church. I searched through the trees that were the woods that were my everything as a kid, but they refused to move. I repeated it again just to be polite, in case He didn’t hear me, and got nothing. I understood later that that’s a common command of the selfish but that didn’t stop the tumble through atheism, agnosticism, and ambivalence that filled me up to yea high until now. But as the wind rocked the tree to my left and line of them directly in front of where I sat in Sunset Park, I realized what a jerk I was then. The wind doesn’t blow for me. It seems that only after the dam floods does fishing for comfort lead to humility.

Everyone paused as the sun set. Even the kid in the oversized sweatshirt and hood and massive earphones moved to a better vantage above the tree line. I stared into the sun as it started down, but it started to eclipse everything else, and the purplish splotchy bits, like bruises on my point of view, took over if I blinked away for a moment. My head had exercised its metaphor muscle for about two hours already, so it couldn’t help itself. The sun was a source of beauty, but gaze too long and fully, and the rest gets lost. Blue Manhattan far away, light on the buildings, light on the grass, light on the harbor, the way the city got more saturated, definitive in receding light, all gone.

 

There was a father and son blowing bubbles with a $2 bubble machine. The soap spheres bowed up the hill towards me, and the child screeched, chased them and then barrel-rolled back down to start again. I tried to take a video of it: the bubbles’ collective trajectory up the hill, the clear sky, Manhattan in the far right almost entirely out of frame, the child, the father, the $2 bubble machine. I couldn’t tell if I had pushed record because of the light’s glare, but as a fresh swarm floated past me, one popped on the corner of my phone as if to say, “Don’t try it. This — not the mini-movie — is it.

You got me there, Bubble. My phone lost power in the next moment, and I gained my breath.

In the weeks after I sought out anyone who could help me prove that I didn’t move to this city for him, that my decision was my own and that it was a good one. Also, a heat wave descended on New York and trolling for air conditioning units in the better-ventilated apartments than mine became a mode of survival. When the proxy dam I propped up in the mean time can’t withstand the torrent, I reconsider the materials. When that doesn’t work I get to higher ground and I let it come, resolved that there are worse things than personal revelations folding over one another. And I’ll keep returning to the lists until I can fill the spaces in between.

Kenzie Bryant is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Queens.

"Fine and Mellow" - Jose James (mp3)

"I Thought About You" - Jose James (mp3)