Myself When I’m Real

Demotion*

March 15, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

My neighbor, whose name I’ve of course forgotten—if in fact I ever knew it in the first place—(and, being roughly my age, never objects to and always answers my irrefutably cordial salutations which include chief, dude, bro, and the ever appropriate and all-purpose man) is standing outside my door: I can see him through the peep hole.

While I wonder if I should wait to see if he’ll knock again, he knocks again. It’s eight-thirty in the morning, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

“Hey Murph,” he says, embarrassed or anxious. Or both (at least he remembers my name).

“What’s up my man?” I say, not missing a beat.

“Listen, sorry to bother you…you on your way to work?”

“Yeah, actually…why, is everything okay?”

“Uh, yeah, listen, do you mind if I come inside for a second?”

I back up obligingly, resigned to roll with it. What choice is there? After all, I did open the door.

He corners me in my kitchen and asks if I know anyone who might be interested in buying a condo. His condo, for instance.

“I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love to live here,” I offer.

“Yeah, I know, but…I mean, do you know anyone who’s looking to buy a place?”

“I’d be happy to ask around, you know, put the word on the street and whatnot…”

“Yeah, that’d be cool, I’d appreciate that.”

He looks away and it’s my turn to say something.

“Everything okay?”

‘Yeah, well, I got laid off, you know? So I’m just gonna move home for a while, with my folks. You know, ‘til I get my shit straight.”

“I hear you,” I say as encouragingly as possible, but it’s only half true. I do hear him, but I also hear myself (saying I hear you) as well as the voice inside my head, which is processing this situation and repeating the verdict: Not good, not good, not good.

He is sweating, his hands—which seem puffy and pale, I’ve never noticed what unbelievable meat hooks he has, though admittedly, the only times I bump into him are in the hallway as he disappears into his end unit with a case of Bud Light cans under one arm, McDonalds or some other fast food monstrosity in the other—his hands, exhibits A and B, are shaking like the lid on a boiling pot, they are very obviously not obeying their master, and before I have half a chance to put two and two together he interrupts my internal assessment and looks at me searchingly.

“Hey Murph, you got any beer?”

At eight thirty-three in the A.M., there is only one possible answer to a question like this: “Sure,” I say.

I open the refrigerator and remember: I drank my last beer last night, which makes me a liar.

“Actually, I don’t,” I start, but sense that will not suffice, so I hold the door open and let him inspect for himself, which he does, making us both feel better—or worse—depending on how you look at it. He accepts this answer, but is clearly not satisfied with my response.

“Oh. I have plenty of liquor, if…”

“Yeah, do you care if I take a shot of something?”

Are you sure you’re okay? (To myself I say this).

A pint glass is obviously inappropriate, so I grab a juice glass and put it down on the counter, sliding it over to him like a bartender from a black and white western. He has eagerly grabbed my fifth of Bushmills and I tell him to help himself.

He pours a generous, bordering on unbelievable, belt of my booze and inhales it in one febrile motion. This is strictly business (to myself I say this).

“Better?” I inquire, and actually mean it, I actually want to know.

“Uh…do you mind if I get another one?”

“Hey bro, knock yourself out,” I say. Stupidly.

He doesn’t notice because he’s too busy securing the second round in case I try and give last call at the last second. Even the sweat on his forehead seems relieved. Although I know exactly what time it is, I can’t help myself from looking up at the digits blinking on my oven: 8:34.

He looks at me and nods his head, expressing gratitude with his burning eyes. The eyes never lie. Then he snatches a tube of toothpaste out of his front pocket, puts it in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

“So, you wouldn’t mind asking around, you know, just see if anyone is looking to maybe live here…I’ll cut a deal…”

“No problem,” I assure him.

“…I’ll hook you up with a finder’s fee too…”

“Oh don’t worry about that man, I’m happy to help.”

Not good, not good, not good.

“Let me give you a card,” he says, putting the toothpaste back and reaching into his other pocket. I’m surprised, in spite of myself, that between the shaking and the sheer size of his hands he can even fit them into his shirtsleeves.

“Fuck,” he says, frazzled or furious. Or both.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I left my fucking cards in my place…”

“Well don’t worry about it, let me just write your number down and…”

“No, let me run and get them, and you can hand them out and shit…”

“Okay.”

***

I wait (too long) and go down to get them myself.

On the way, I think: Gambling debts? Drugs? Or both?

Drugs, it must be drugs.

Whatever it is, it’s something I know I want no part of. It’s obviously something my neighbor wants no part of either, or we wouldn’t both be here right now.

I knock on the door.

It opens, quickly, and my neighbor walks out, shutting it behind him. Apparently I’m not supposed to see inside. Perhaps I don’t want to see inside.

He follows me into the hall.

“Hey Murph, I appreciate anything you can do.”

“No problem dude, I’m happy to help…”

“Listen,” he leans in close. “Do you mind if I grab another shot?”

“Sure man.”

I’ve already locked my door on the way out, so I let myself back in, tricking my dog into thinking a full day has already passed.

The bottle and glass are still on the counter, forming sticky circles of an early morning crime scene.

“Do you mind if I pour a stiff one?”

“Help yourself, chief.”

You want to take the bottle with you? (To myself I say this).

He pours a shot that would give Liberty Valance pause, polishes it off, and then pulls out the toothpaste from his holster.

I ask no questions, he tells no tales.

I tell my dog to hold down the fort (again) and my dog looks confused or disappointed. Or both. I lock the door (again) and escort my soon-to-be-ex-neighbor out.

“Thanks again.”

“Okay man, take care of yourself.”

“Give me a call if you hear anything.”

“Will do.”

Both of us seem to understand, as we go our separate ways, that we’ll never see each other again, and we are each somewhat deflated, probably for opposite reasons.

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

3.14: Happy Pi Day

March 14, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

If you’ve never seen Pi, Darren Aronofsky’s first (and best) movie, I strongly encourage you to check it out.

(Hint: it’s not just a number; it’s a concept of existence. Or something. Even a math illiterate like myself can appreciate how numbers and pure calculations describe and define multiple aspects of what we call reality. That doesn’t mean I endorse being force-fed Algebra as a teenager.)

Pi is not just for math geeks, as both Aronofsky and Kate Bush (to take two notable examples) have proven.

(If Kate Bush had been my Geometry teacher I may have paid more attention in class. I may have learned something. I may have even come by after school in hopes of some tutoring. I may have wanted otehr things as well. I still do.)

Filed Under: Ruminations in Real Time Tagged With: Darren Aronofsky, Kate Bush, Pi

Tasting China The Way Peter Chang Intended (Revisited)

March 13, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Well, it felt that way as I drove alone, into the deep country dark of 29 North, heading for the place I used to call home. But I knew, as I put distance between where I was going and where I had been, the fulcrum that balanced my appetites, my bearings and possibly my sanity had been permanently put asunder. That a destination had been forever elevated to a point of depature, a siren song that would assail my ears and lure me back again and…

Well, not necessarily.

But having drunk deeply from the broth of the gods, and, filled with that savory and soul-affirming stuff, I could never possibly look at the world the same…

Okay, not exactly.

But I had eaten a meal from a menu designed by a man that some seem to worship, and others have treated like a holy pilgrimage, travelling great distances not unlike those three sojourners followed the brightest star, which guided them through the desert to a manger on that cold night over two centuries…

Well, you get the picture.

I had come to Charlottesville to visit my boy Jamey, the genius behind Barlow Brewing (and I don’t throw that word around lightly: this guy makes homebrews like nobody’s business; so much so that I want it to become his business and I can buy his beers, all the time, in support of his eventual, inevitable empire), and, in his blessed company, eat, drink and be merry. There was some drinking and merriment, but after we got around to eating, that was all she wrote. All that was left, after that meal, was surviving.

I’ve heard, and been guilty of using, the banal expression “food coma” before, and while I’ve stuffed myself beyond what I figured was a reasonable capacity on a couple of occasions, I’d never really had any firsthand experience with what some people must be talking about when they talk about food comas. For starters, I ate more than my fill; we all did. I ate the way an indulged golden retriever will scarf down snausages so long as an irresponsible owner continues making them available. (I don’t want to shoehorn, or belabor the implicit Pavlovian metaphor, but there is no question that, after only one meal, I am confident Chef Chang could make me salivate on command as soon as I smelled whatever he was tossing inside his magic wok.) You think I’m kidding? Get a load of this appetizer:

Oh, did I mention that I was eating at Taste of China?

Where? You may have heard of it. No, really. This place, and especially its enigmatic rock star chef Peter Chang, have been the subject of recent features in The Oxford American (by brilliant food critic Todd Kliman) as well as a slightly popular publication called The New Yorker (by Calvin Trillin).

I wish I could say I discerned an awkward tension in the air, a sense of urgency muted by ambivalence: a sort of preemptive resignation that the chef, the great man who had made these crowds flock to an unassuming strip mall on the first warm Saturday of the year (following the longest and most brutal winter most folks can recall ever having suffered through and who would, under any other circumstances, be grilling out or sunbathing or washing their cars or scooping dog shit in their backyards –anything so long as they were outside soaking in this sublime air) was about to do what he always does. Leave.

But the reality was that it looked like exactly what it was: an extremely busy restaurant during dinner service. No more and no less. But there was an electricity in the air; the type of heat that is generated when a particular event is lit by the combined buzz of hope and expectation. Everyone in the restaurant was aware of it: looking at each other, looking at the plates in front of them and especially on other tables, looking at the wait staff gliding and humming through the maze of tables like tuxedoed worker bees, looking toward the kitchen door at the back of the room to see if perhaps he would make an appearance. This was the kind of vibe that people in urban hot spots crave and people who can only read about them covet. This must be what it’s like to secure a reservation at a hot new club in New York City, except for the refreshing lack of hipsters, posers and the fat-walleted fuckwads who cash in their souls for cachet, all out of a sybaritic impulse to separate themselves from the hoi polloi.

Well, let’s keep it real: how many people (like myself) were here because they read about it and knew they had to come here? Certainly, there were more than a fair share of folks who just reckoned this was the hip (but not hipster!) place in which to add a notch to their culinary belts. But any venue, in any town, is going to inexorably attract the remoras who want to latch on to cultural shark. Bottom line: Taste of China is located in a fucking strip mall! That’s called keeping it real ’til it flatlines.

Back to that food coma. We ate, and ate, and we ate some more. If they had kept bringing food, we would have packed it in until we crumbled out of our chairs. And then we would have fallen on all fours and lapped it up like the aforementioned golden retriever. You’ll notice I’m not talking about the actual dishes or what they tasted like. For a sense of how good the food is, and the types of flavors and surprises it combines, check out the Kliman article: it’s a fantastic piece of journalism and Kliman is a more than capable food critic. I will say that while I’m unabashed about going deep as often as I can afford to (financially and gastronomically), most of my previous experiences ill-prepared me for the explosion of competing and, at first, discordant sensations this meal contained. That appetizer, pictured above, had a heat that numbed the lips, setting the tone for the spices to fight it out with the sweetly flavored slices of chicken: it was like lighting a match under an icicle. Suffice it to say, it was the type of (exceedingly rare) meal where you are already mentally recalling which items from the menu you will need to try next time, and the time after. But mostly you are transfixed by what is happening around you and inside you.

And then it’s over. You don’t linger; in part because you are able to see the line extending out the door, and mostly because once it looks like you’re done, the wait staff lets you know you’re done. They may have filled my water glass three times in an hour but they came back to see if we’d eaten our last bites five or six times. “We get the picture,” we would have said if our insensate tongues could form the words. Getting to the front door was a combination of concentrated effort (it was difficult to walk) and amusement (looking at all the eager faces of imminent diners who could read their futures in the strands of sweat dropping from my steaming dome). Getting to the car was a commitment. Thinking about following this meal with the beers we intended to drink was, inconceivably, inconceivable. And, being in a college town, we gave it the old college try. It wasn’t happening. Barlow The Brewer and I could barely finish our post-meal pints, and that has to be a first in our collective life stories. The only thing left was to call it a night and make the long, lonely drive back to the Chang-less city I call home.

Even as I sent the obligatory message, ruminating about available weekends for subsequent road trips, I had a feeling (based mostly on Chang’s notorious history, detailed in Kliman’s article) that he could not be long for C’Ville. A line out the door at 5:20 P.M. at an establishment without a bouncer means it has reached a tipping point. How long before Chang, compelled by his own internal mechanisms, or genuinely burnt out from a ceaseless crowd of insatiable clients, packed up his proverbial knives and went? How many more meals can I squeeze in, I wondered. Can we carry this dream through the end of summer?

Any questions?

Turns out my sense of urgency was well-warranted: Chang has left the building. We were there for his last shift.

This hurts. And, if you live in or around Charlottesville, it hurts you more than it does me. You missed your chance.

Or are you the lucky ones who will never have to wonder and worry if you’ll get another opportunity to have a meal that looks like this?

I am confident Chang and I will meet again.

Until then, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to taste China the way he intended.

Filed Under: Ruminations in Real Time Tagged With: Peter Chang, Taste of China

Compassion*

March 10, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

License registration, no I ain’t got none,
But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done…

When you find yourself singing Bruce Springsteen lyrics in New Jersey to a state trooper in the hopes of avoiding a ticket, you might as well close your eyes, see what happens:
Maybe you could talk to the cop and explain that it was not disrespect for the rules of the road, but love of—and getting lost in—art that caused you to forget. To forget where you were and who you were, only to find yourself in the unfamiliar role of fugitive.
And maybe he would understand.
Maybe he would engage you in a discussion about music, and how it helps us, how it is always there, and occasionally compels us to do things we would not otherwise do.
And maybe, after everything was said and done, you would stop, and ask him if he was real, if this could ever actually happen.
And maybe he would wink familiarly, as if to say: This is America, ain’t it? Anything is possible.
And maybe you would believe him, even as you heard his footsteps fading away.
And by the time you opened your eyes, maybe you were still rolling down the road, the only reality being the speed and the sky, and the siren song of metal and machinery.

A vision:

Finally, his car needed fuel, he needed fuel; so he had no choice but to stop at the godforsaken rest area. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped at the same rest area: equal parts public toilet, food court and concessions stand. It was at once appalling and extraordinary; it was, in short, America.

Who were they, the people all around him? They were everyone: departing or arriving, leaving for vacation, returning to work, delighted, delirious, above all, anonymous. In New Jersey, or in any small town, or everywhere in America, there are people who find themselves lost; the people with nowhere left to go. A cliché? Sure. But clichés are made, not born. Reality, of course, is a cliché, and we have discovered that clichés—even as they are the enemy of art and authenticity—can be our friends. And so: going to church makes us sense spirituality, so we go; playing carols at Christmas facilitates a feeling of festivity, so we play; falling in love makes us feel loved, so we fall. We need all the help we can find, so we find friends and never look back.
He looked back; he looked around and in front of him, seeing the stereotypes: the ones in his mind that everything but experience had created. Or was the Cliché unfurling itself, the one that perpetuates from a particular place: experience, repetition, pattern, tradition? He saw them, he saw how he wanted to see them, he saw how they saw him, he saw how they saw him seeing them, and so on.
And who was he?
What was he all about? What had he done? Where had he been? Where was he going? Who did he think he was? Everyman? No man? Or worse: the type of person who actually asks questions like this.
Walking away, stomach full and mind clear, he saw her. He could not help noticing the forsaken sister walking in circles, seeking a corner of the room that wasn’t there. How old was she? Eighteen? Eighty? Somewhere right in between? Satisfied with a meek drink in the water fountain, she was the type of person who unthinkingly drank from public water fountains. Does anyone drink from public water fountains anymore? Do they still exist? Does anyone even notice them?
It was hard not to notice her, impossible not to notice that pain.
Pain: Dostoyevsky, disconcerted as he was with crime and punishment, saw all the suffering of the world in a prostitute’s eyes, and sobbed when he witnessed a peasant, hard-pressed with impotent anger, beating his horse to death. He opened his eyes and half expected to see this woman whipping herself while Nietzsche—knowing full well that God was dead— held his head and wept. Who was she, and what was she doing here?
A hooker, a homeless person? A mother, a case of mistaken identity? A human symbol of hope, or Hope herself—a deity deferred, paying the price for us all, all of us sinners and those sins we can scarcely describe.
She’s just like me, a voice inside attempted to say, a voice he very well may have listened to—a voice he had come dangerously close to growing into, under the shadow of the ivory tower—had he opted to make certain decisions along the way.
He walked over, ready to help: offer money, lend a hand, do whatever needed to be done, even and especially the things he had neither the ways nor means to make happen. He walked over and smiled, and she spoke, making him an offer he had no choice but to refuse.
It was enough to make one wonder if (and even wish that) the stories in the bible, and those fairy tales and myths men have made all have a foundation in fact. That the slow, ceaseless suffering some of us occasionally see is in accordance with a plan, a motion picture we have no part in producing. That it was not even personal, all this erstwhile, enigmatic madness, it was strictly business. It was enough to cause the hardest of humans to hope for a beneficent Big Guy (or Lady, but it is asking too much for God to have the decency to be a woman) upstairs, shuffling that proverbial deck. Or cutting and pasting the appropriate pieces of the puzzle, always keeping a wise eye on the endearing idiots underneath, and generally doing and saying the things that the creator of an entire universe says and does.
But how the hell are we supposed to have hope when Hope herself had been reduced to this, turning tricks at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike?

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Bruce Springsteen, eyvind kang, Mary of Magdalene, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Sobriety*

March 9, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

When I lucked into my first so-called real job I got in the habit of referring to the time—admittedly too long—spent in the service industry as the bad old days. It wasn’t because I had no fun (I did) or that I thought there was any future in it (I didn’t). It wasn’t that I felt joining the corporate world (grad students and waiters refer to it as the real world) was any type of instant ticket to peace or fulfillment. But it did remove one from the front lines of a scene with too many lives on the fast track to nowhere. Most people there fail to understand where they are, and where they are not going.

And when I think of the place some people never find a way to leave, it makes me remember one person in particular. More than the implicit slights suffered or the stalled potential each day I strapped on an apron, when I think about what I could never afford to lose, I think of Izzy. That, of course, was not his real name, but it was what everyone called him. When he and I first met I would have sworn he was in his mid-forties, but in fact he had only recently turned thirty-six. Not old in the nine-to-five arena but ancient in the restaurant business. A lifer who had never been promoted to general manager, he was a satellite drifting through the soiled orbit of a franchised business. He was never handed his own place to run, and he seemed entirely satisfied with that arrangement. In fact, as I came to see for myself, he counted on being an assistant behind the scenes, the hardened soldier who could close up shop and count the checks. We were often the last two left, hours after the final customer had called a cab or rolled the DWI dice. After a shift that started at 4 PM Izzy would set up camp in the sweltering office in the back of the kitchen, going about the unexciting but excuses-free business of closing up.

When Izzy showed up for his shift the following afternoon he always looked like someone had scraped him off the bottom of a greasy skillet. Red eyes blurred, his neck shrieking in silent agony from the burn of a blunt razor, the cigarettes and coffee escaping in sluggish waves from every inch of his sagging skin. Head bowed not in deference but disdain of the daylight; he could scarcely formulate the words being signaled from bruised brain to long-suffering lips. He would step up to the bar, shake his head and ask me to call him an ambulance. Then he’d disappear into the men’s room for a minute or two, emerging like a televangelist with a badly ironed shirt. He could barely tie his shoe, but after his magic act in the crapper he would be ready to plate a thousand entrees and run laps around the building in his wingtips (managers who wear comfortable shoes are never taken seriously, but they don’t realize until it’s too late that it’s not because of the shoes).

For the next eight-to-ten hours, in between return trips to the powder room (occasionally he may have even used the toilet), Izzy was constant, awkward motion. All the waiters were in awe of him and all the waitresses were repulsed by him (especially the ones he had slept with). Izzy could sweat out more alcohol in a single shift than most of us could drink in an entire weekend, and he never missed a day of work during the two years I knew him. Even if you didn’t catch him ducking into the bathroom you always knew he had recently refueled because he would suck his teeth like someone trying to extract snake venom. The lip smacking and teeth licking were, to me, the black and blue collar stage of development between rock star and burnout, the line so many in the service industry straddle before they get out or go under.

None of this fazed me, which isn’t to say it was not unsettling, but grunts in the trench don’t offer advice to their sergeants, so I mainly focused on my own unsavory habits. But I could never figure out how Izzy, when he retreated to the office each night to match receipts, guest checks and time sheets, was able to polish off an entire bottle of peppermint schnapps. When he finally went home, closer to sunrise than midnight, that bottle he took back with him would always be empty. At first I figured he was trying to impress or even intimidate me (full success on both fronts), but after months of the same scenario, I had no choice but to acknowledge that his appetites and obsessions had, at some point, evolved from unhealthy to superhuman. That bottle was not something he wanted, and was no longer something he needed; it was simply something that he required, along with the bathroom breaks and the air his lungs inhaled. I worked dozens of shifts where I didn’t see him eat a scrap of food, but he never went into that office without his bottle of schnapps. And at least once a week he’d arrive at work with fresh bottles he kept to stock the bar. I could never fathom the physics, or biology (or algebra) that enabled a man to drain a fifth each evening and still function, but I also learned the hard way in high school that some subjects would, for me, remain forever mysterious.

By the time he took his transfer to the next location (never a demotion but never an advancement) he looked like he could collect social security. How long can that lifestyle sustain itself? I asked myself, then, and ponder it now. Where is Izzy today? Is he in an assisted living facility somewhere, or at the bottom of a river? Will I find him patrolling an intersection one night, not embarrassed to ask for tips after all these years? Or did he take the hard way out and start a family; his bad habits replaced by baby bottles, dirty diapers and manicured lawns? Has he subscribed to an altogether different sort of salvation, whacked out of his skull with sobriety?

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: For Your Life, led zeppelin, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Drinking*

March 7, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I still have hangovers, thank God.

Everyone who has known an alcoholic knows that as soon as you stop feeling the pain, it’s because you are no longer feeling the pain; you are no longer feeling much of anything.

So, I welcome the horrors of the digital cock crowing in my ear at an uncalled for hour, am grateful for the flaming phlegm in my throat, the snakes chasing their tails through my sinuses, the smoke stuck behind my eyelids, the shards of glass in my gut, and the special ring of hell circling my head. Because if it weren’t for those handful of my least favorite things, I’d know I had some serious problems.

All of us can think of a friend whose father (or mother for that matter), we came to understand, was in an entirely different league when it came to the science of cirrhosis. The man who falls asleep fully clothed with a snifter balanced over his balls, then up and out the door before sunrise—like the rest of the inverted vampires who do their dirty work during the day in three piece suits. Maybe it was a martini at lunch, or several cigarettes an hour to take the edge off. Whatever it was, whatever it took, they always made it out, and they always came back, for the family and to the refrigerator, filled with the best friends anyone can afford.

Our friends’ fathers came of age in the bad old days that fight it out, for posterity, in the pages of books, uneasy memories and the wishful thinking of TV reruns: the ‘50’s. These are men who have never opened a bottle of wine and have no use for imported beer, men who actually have rye in their liquor cabinets—who still have liquor cabinets for that matter. These are men who were raised by men that never considered church or sick-days optional, and the only thing they disliked more than strangers was their neighbors. Men who didn’t believe in diseases and didn’t drink to escape so much as to remind themselves exactly what they never had a chance to become. Theirs was an alcoholism that did not involve happy hours and karaoke contests; theirs was a sit down with the radio and a whiskey sour, a refill with dinner and one before, during and after the ballgame. Or maybe they’d mow the lawn to liven things up, tinker under the hood of a car that had decades to go before it could become a classic. Or perhaps friends would come over to play cards. Sometimes a second bottle would get broken out. This was a slow burn of similar nights: stiff upper lips, the sun setting on boys playing baseball, mothers sitting on the couch watching TVs families did not yet own, of forced smiles battling bottled tears in the bottom of a coffee mug, of amphetamines and affairs, overhead fans and undernourished kids, of evening papers and a creeping conviction that there is no God, of poets unable to make art out of the mess they’d made of their lives.

It was a hard time where people did not live happily ever after, if they ever lived at all. It was a time, in other words, not unlike our own.

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, The Crystal Ship, The Doors

Hard To Get Over Lonely People*

March 6, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Hard to get over lonely people.

That is a line from a very famous song, although those are not the correct words. Those are the words I heard, which sounded and seemed real enough, until my older ears eventually understood that I had in fact been making a great song even better—in my mind anyway.

Ah, look at all the lonely people, I think. To myself.

A vision:

Cats are everywhere.

How did this happen? When did that slippery slope of sentimental turn from simple companionship to disconcerting, then beyond even that? It’s not your fault: you could see the other cats coming, waiting out there in the evening; and yourself, inside, able at any time to make it all better. All of these overlooked lives, are they the symptom or the antidote for that feeling you cannot constrain? Are they serving a separate purpose, a preemptive action against isolation? An excuse to keep connected, in some small way? A strategy to keep from slipping, to stave off starvation? Or the streets, which are always hungry, always eager to be kept company when nights bring the cold comfort of winter?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Yes, you think (to yourself again): it could be all of those things, eventually. Inevitably. But mostly (you know), any effort you might someday make would be driven by the fear of becoming that person. The person who everyone knew, the one who had patrolled the same city corner for as long as anyone was able—or wanted—to remember. The man with his hand-scribbled signs, capital letter screeds against the machine, words that sought to explain who he was and why he was here. His message, excusing himself from any culpability, of course, and allowing everyone who took the time to try and make sense of it all that they were either with him or against him; if they did nothing to intervene, they were abetting the not-so-secret society that could snap a finger and take everything you owned, including your identity. He stood at the intersection for years, outlasting several politicians who recycled themselves in public office, sworn to uphold the status quo and ensure that the have-nots would not, and keep everyone else safe from the crimes committed by people who could not close their eyes.

And then, one day, he was no longer there. He had just disappeared.

How does this happen?

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

You’ve seen some things, of course. You have heard them, read about them. The things people talked about when they talked about crazy people. The sort of people who, after numerous squabbles with long-suffering neighbors, finally had to have it out with Johnny Law over the piles of junk spewing out from their cellars, piling out from inside, forming extensions of the hand-me-down universe they’d created (in their own image?)—misguided gods of an always-imperfect world. These people who would holler and curse, and show up in court, when convicted, to protest that there was a method to their madness (they wouldn’t call it madness at all), a purpose to their paranoia, that it was no one else’s business if they found some sort of salvation in other folks’ debris, redeemable lives otherwise left for dead. Exasperated landlords, forced to take pictures in order to appeal to the proper authorities, having to prove that they weren’t capable of fabricating this sort of insanity: carpets pulled up from the floors, the linoleum in the kitchen removed, presumably by hand, the stacks of unread newspapers, the insects. And the pictures, of course, only half told the story, since pictures don’t move, pictures don’t stink, pictures only imitate what they are programmed to report. The stories that go far beyond the obligatory shit-smeared-on-the-walls sort of psychosis that always seems so overdone in bad movies (because the movies are bad; because truth always outpaces our best efforts to expose it).

Then what happens?

You are (of course) left asking questions that always better unaddressed. Who could explain the motivation behind behavior like that? Who would want to? Who could comprehend where a mind has been, or is going, to find sense or security in this imitation of living?

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Eleanor Rigby, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, the beatles

Semi-Autobiographical, Inspired By a Best Friend (Revisited)*

February 20, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I am not alone. I have a best friend, who happens to be a dog. He is really good for me, reminding me to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom and generally making sure that I get out a few times a day. He walks me whenever he gets the chance. Our favorite time is after work, when we reenter the building and the walls and halls come alive, warm with the savory smells of home-made meals (you can never smell fast food, although that scent lingers in the elevator, as if ashamed to be associated with the honesty, the effort and industry of these prepared productions).
No one sits down to dinner anymore, but all around me, people are sitting down, eating meat loaf, or some sort of roast that has simmered on low heat all afternoon. Maybe there is even a pie prepared for dessert. Maybe, inside someone’s kitchen, it’s still the 1950’s.
And I remind myself that someday, if my cards play me right, I will enjoy a real meal around a table, and experience all that I’ve been missing during these efficient years of isolation. I will clear the table and clean the dishes, I will sit on the couch and take a crack at the crossword, or catch a made-for-TV movie, or go run errands or consult a book of baby names for the offspring on the way, and eventually I will work on improving my bad habits and attempt to overlook my wife’s inadequacies (the quirks that were so endearing in those early days). I will, at last, learn to communicate openly and as an adult. Mostly, I will not be alone.

***

My dog is a trooper.
He’s never called in sick a single day of his life: up at the crack of dawn every day, including weekends, stretched, eager and anxious to take on the world. Or at least take a walk.
My dog takes his work very seriously, and has succeeded in making more friends than I have. He does not discriminate: men, women, cars, trees, and other dogs—especially other dogs. He wants to meet everyone, and he patrols the neighborhood like it’s his job. I, for one, admire his dedication.
Thanks to him, I am on a first-name basis with all the other dogs in my building, though I have a hard time remembering what to call their owners.
Take this guy: an older man (I don’t want to call him an old man), whose name I’ve never gotten around to establishing. I sort of prefer it that way, as he provides me with a mystery I enjoy embellishing. Where most of my neighbors are obviously what they are: mothers, fathers, bachelors, wives, working stiffs, senior citizens, anonymous law-abiding entities, et cetera, this man alone retains, for me and my imagination, an enigmatic air. He wears a wedding band, but I’ve never seen or met his spouse. He is friendly, so much so that it initially took me a while to warm up to him.
Maybe this is the way other people saw my old man. Yes, he is definitely someone’s father: he has rolled up his sleeves to punish, praise, clean, counsel, inspire, admonish, argue, approve, second-guess, support and silence. In short, things I have never done. And I think (I can’t help myself): he is a way I’ll never be.
All of us, of course, are more or less the same: we live, we work, we sleep, we eat, we love, we fight, we forget, we try to remember, we think, we wear down and then we die. In this regard, all living creatures are more alike than not.
But humans are different.
We know who we are, so we wonder (we can’t help ourselves) things like: What has that man done that I’ll never do? What has he seen that I’ll never see? What parts of the world he once lived in are gone forever, replaced by newer things that younger people, not yet born, will wonder about, in time?
I think:
If I had lived in the ‘50’s, that man might have been a spy; a professor, a pedophile (I would have called him a pervert), a recluse, a con artist—but above all, he most certainly would be a Communist.
If I had lived in the ‘50’s, I would eat an egg for breakfast each morning with either bacon or sausage or sometimes both, I would also eat pastrami sandwiches, drink whole milk and smoke endless streams of cigarettes, I would be father to as many children as God (most certainly a Capitalist God) saw fit to provide, I would live closer to my parents, I would miss church service seldom on Sundays and never on Holy Days of Obligation, I would know how to fix my toilet and sink if they dripped, I would never have had a shirt professionally pressed, I would drive an American car and never wear a seat belt, I would have a job that I could actually describe in one or two words. I would be, quite conceivably, content.
My dog is content. One thing is for sure: if my dog lived in the 50’s, he would be content, just as he would be content fifty years from now. After all, all dogs want is other dogs (I think my dog thinks I’m a dog). People aren’t like that, which, I suppose is why people love dogs. The older man and I love our dogs, and for a few seconds we watch them sniff each other.
“Hot enough for ya?”
“Yeah well, it’s the humidity!”
(To ourselves we say this).
Then we go our separate ways, exchanging pleasantries.
I say: Have a nice day.
Likewise, he replies, and then smiles. Not to mention a nice life.
I smile, and then walk away, still smiling. Who the hell does this guy think he is, saying something like that? How dare he say something like that. Unless he means it. No one says something like that. Unless they are actually, inconceivably content.
I’m still smiling, but then a sobering thought sideswipes me (again): That man is a way I’ll never be.

***

My dog is mad at me.
I can’t blame him.
He knows the rules: I don’t come home, I’m in violation of the contract (two meals, a bowl at least half full with half-clean water, and a minimum of three walks a day), so he is entitled to cut loose all over the kitchen floor, or even the couch.
But my pal is a team player; he has character. He held it. For me. And, I reckon, for himself; after all, it’s his house too.
His tail does its thing; I’m surprised he doesn’t take flight, and he is happy. Dogs cannot suppress that genuine love and honesty. But then, after the walk (and a piss that would make a drunken mule proud) he recovers and reverts to character: not taking the treat (Who wants a biscuit? I say. Not me, his back says), sitting on the other side of the room. Normally this would be my opportunity, my obligation, to win him over; shower him with affection and praise, but I can’t. I just don’t have it in me. The poor guy, he probably thinks I’m ignoring him. But I’m simply too hung over to address this injustice.
Eventually, inevitably, he comes around. The little wags every time I look over, the overtures of amiability, his minuscule capacity for indignation already exceeded. He follows me into the kitchen, and as I look around—still too ashamed to directly acknowledge him—searching for distraction, the oddly recurring thought once again arises: Can I possibly be the only person afraid to utilize the self-cleaning function of my oven? I don’t trust it. I don’t trust anything that makes promises it can’t keep. Then again, if I actually used my oven, this admittedly might be a more enticing feature.
In no time my dog is all over me, drunk from love as well as the fumes seeping through my skin.
I don’t mislead him: the best I’ll be able to offer is space beside me while I doze in and out of recrimination and self-pity. As usual, he has no complaints; happy to receive whatever I will give him. Dogs, after all, are not unlike humans: they need food and water, and shelter and support. But they also need love.

***

My dog punches the clock, chasing after creatures he has no chance of catching. He chases squirrels the way his owner chases women: blindly and brazenly, but with no idea what he’d actually do if he ever caught one.

***

Take off all your clothes, I say.
No, she laughs.
“Be careful,” I say as she gets down on the carpet to entertain my dog’s playful overtures. “He’s a lady-killer.”
“Like his daddy?” she asks, making it too easy, or not easy enough, depending on how it all undresses.
“Hardly,” I say, reaching for the bottle of wine that is equal parts incriminating and inspiring—mostly, and most importantly, it is empty.
“You two make a cute couple,” I say, equal parts innocent, honest, envious.
“Why don’t you join us?”
Put on all your clothes, I do not say.
“Are you drunk,” she says.
“Never,” I lie.
“Am I drunk?” she asks.
“Not enough,” I sigh.
“What did you say,” she whispers.
“Nothing,” I lie.
Take off all your clothes, she laughs.
Okay, I say.

***

When he was a puppy, my dog would whimper anytime I was out of sight. All through his infancy, all he seemed to want was to share space with me, inhale the air I exhaled, flirt with my feet with his nose. As he settled into the dog-eared years of adolescence, we got into a good groove: aside from the inevitable, and understandable, teenage tantrums; he was everything I could ever have hoped for. Once he was old enough to drive he would sometimes scold me: if I stayed out all night or stumbled through another substandard evening stroll, or when I collapsed from exhaustion after throwing a toy once or twice, he conveyed his disenchantment by setting up camp across the room, safely out of reach, to put his head between his hands and sulk. And stare. You can always tell when a dog is unhappy because the rest of the time they are either ecstatic or asleep.

***

Bang: Another day ends with a whimper and all of us respectable citizens retire to our tents and our troubles.
My dog is waiting impatiently, and greets me with his usual eagerness. If there is one utterly amenable character in my world, it’s him: he treats me better on a bad day then I could ever pay another human being to approximate.
Outside, the cold does not dishearten him and I remind myself to take notes.
A siren sounds and he howls, ostensibly in approval. Being a human, I think on more practical levels: A siren, at night, really does sound like a woman screaming. Or a man for that matter. And perhaps that’s the point.
Overhead, sleet sizzles on the imperious power lines, flirting with disaster each time it touches the warm anger that can kill it. Anxious electricity is all around me, earning its money like everything else.
And the cold—the confidence of the cold—subduing the air which has that heartwarming wood-burning scent of banked fires; which is odd, as my building only has gas fireplaces.
Up above, the moon glows, brazen and bright, kept warm (from behind) by a sun I can’t see. Suddenly, my dog becomes very excited, as he is known to do, and I nicely yank him back on the leash, as I’m known to do. When I can’t contain him, and he strains to get where he just was to the point of making loud choking noises, I finally survey the scene and see what he is so enthralled with: a damn trash bag. Half buried in the filthy slush, there must be a discarded bone; I can actually see a bone. A bone that looks a lot like a skull. As my dog sniffs ecstatically around me, I look down carefully and finally understand something that used to be alive is being cruelly preserved in this frigid mound. I disappoint my dog and pull him away from his discovery, and remind him that treats await both of us inside.

***

Her: “What about you?”
Me: “What about me?”
“Do you drink too much?”
“I’m just trying to avoid anything in my life right now that could be considered a cliché.”
“But you do drink too much.”
“Possibly.”
“Well, that’s kind of a cliché, right?”
“True, but so is sobriety.”
“I’m not talking about anything that insane, but how about moderation?”
“That’s the worst cliché of all!”
“Good point…”
“I reckon I’m in okay shape for the shape I’m not in.”
“Well, you have to settle down sometime.”
“I don’t have to do anything of the sort.”
“Do you want children?”
“I don’t know…I can’t imagine my life without children.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I can’t imagine my life with children.”
“I know. If we didn’t need to have jobs to pay the bills we would probably agonize every day over which job to take…”
“Exactly. You just do what you have to do and have faith that it’s meant to be, you make it right, one way or the other.”
“So all it takes, apparently, is faith.”
“Exactly.”
“So what do you do when you don’t have faith?”
“You get a dog.”

*Three years ago, today. Gone, but impossible to replace and never to be forgotten.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Dizzy Gillespie, Leroy Brown, Sonny Rollins, Sunny Side of the Street

Solitude*

February 19, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Anyone who has lost a parent (or worse, a child) can understand that when this happens it becomes an indelible line of demarcation: your life before and your life after. It does not mean nothing is ever the same or that you can never get past it (everything is the same and you can get past it except for the fact that nothing is ever the same and you can never get past it. You don’t want to).

Of course, one need not suffer the untimely death of a parent to appreciate that their presence—in the ways we can measure and the ones we can never fully fathom—are inextricable from one’s own. Up to a certain age my mother was my confidante, my confessor, my friend, my mother. It is discomfiting to imagine how I might have handled her death if it had happened earlier—not to mention much earlier—in my life.

According to the less than immutable laws of society, by definition I became an adult at eighteen. By my rather more reliable reckoning, I did not become an individual prepared to wrestle with adult realities until I’d finished graduate school and then spent several crucial years learning new things and unlearning others.

The period of time that did more than anything else to prepare me for the rest of my life, with and without my mother, were the months from early summer 1995 through late spring 1996. A mutually broken engagement and opting not to enter the PhD program that had accepted me are two decisions that befuddled friends and family, then, and likely perplex some of them, still. It was during this year that I figured out, for the first time, how to take care of myself. I was alone, really alone, for the first time, yet I found that I seldom felt lonely. Being on my own, alone with my thoughts, questions and concerns provided the space—physical and mental—to unravel the reveries that signaled the kind of person I hoped to become.

Being one’s own best friend is dangerous, potentially delusional territory and I knew it. But I found that the more time I spent alone the better I was able to love everyone around me, and my capacity to learn and evolve did not abate. By the time my mother got sick the first person I talked to was myself. If this had happened five or ten years earlier I would have been lost, without a foundation. My mother remained my number one resource in so many regards, but I was finally equipped to withstand the ordeal I had unwittingly been fortifying myself for. Depending on my mind, my music and an ability to take care of myself, I managed to get through it. Barely.

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Charles Mingus, Myself When I'm Real, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Written and Unread*

February 15, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

A vision:

I am reading words written by a dead person. Nothing unusual about this; it’s practically the story of my life. In this case, however, the person who was still living when these words were written is my mother. Words not intended for my eyes, I know.

Or are they?

All these words, something to which my mother could devote her attention; all that available time that required killing to make it pass more quickly—to make it pass, period. All those hours to fill, especially in the days when we did not have five hundred channels to choose from or electronic access to a wide, webbed world. All that boredom, all that solitude, alone with her thoughts, alone with herself. All the unappealing emotions we are better equipped to avoid when we have peace, or at least perspective. All the feelings that ultimately find their way out the only way they can: awkwardly, unabashedly, irrevocably. All those sad songs of uncultivated passions, unexplored options, hours and hours of isolation that turn into tiny eternities. All those entreaties to an indifferent world: equal parts confession and accusation, settling old scores and soliciting understanding—or at least empathy—from people that could never be reached, or were no longer around or who never existed in the first place. All the other people who were busy living while she was busy trying not to die. The dread of nothingness and eventually, the suspicion that a thing which could be so awful was still ending too suddenly.

Who will remember us?

This is the question implicit in all these words, addressed to God, or Nobody or anybody who might be willing to listen. This is the question that cannot be answered except by words and deeds and memories that will occur after you are gone. This is the origin of our primordial impulse to connect and believe we stay associated, somehow, some way, after we are no longer able to interact on human terms. This, perhaps, is what ran through her mind once her eyes closed and she stayed asleep, already in another place, still hoping to apprehend some of the miracles she had or had not happened to miss during her life. This is the final question that, scrubbed of its universal and spiritual covering, asks explicitly and directly: Who will remember me?

***

Starting in the fifth grade, encouraged by a teacher, I began to keep a journal. This practice, initially an assignment, became a compulsion that continued on and off for the next two decades. I seldom feel an urge to revisit these hand-scribbled artifacts, equal parts lack of interest and the likelihood of embarrassment that such necessarily solipsistic exercises would induce. But more importantly, I don’t need to read the words since I remember writing them and can readily recall the circumstances that inspired them.

Journals, as I see them—and utilized them—function as adult versions of diaries, where the purpose is less a regurgitation of events and more a one-way conversation with oneself and, by extension, the world. The act of trying to make sense of life and, by extension, myself, in writing was never intended for other eyes. It served as a self-fulfilling sort of therapy before I even knew what that word meant.

I was not aware, until after she’d died, that my mother kept journals of her own. Knowing her as intimately as I did, I am neither surprised nor am I unable to imagine what themes and concerns inexorably resurface throughout her personal narrative. The catalyst to write, whether it is rooted in an effort to justify or interrogate, is primarily an attempt to get whatever it is on record. Certainly the longing to relate, on a human level, permits us to unburden ourselves, whether this interaction involves friends, spouses or therapists. I know my mother frequently utilized all of these outlets and some of the time it helped. (I’d like to think it was most of the time but I can’t know and I won’t kid myself.) Regardless, she was still compelled to document her hopes, fears and disappointments on paper, and that fact is its own commentary on how reliable she found her various support systems.

I am not especially inclined to read these words. They were not addressed to me, and I am aware that they were intended for an outlet that could not adequately quall her discomfort, then, and no longer exists for her, now. My sister found some of these journals and could not resist the temptation to read them. She was not looking for them; her discovery occurred as part of the aftermath, during the process of going through items my mother left behind. My sister, at that time, wanted a piece of everything my mother had touched, anything she could put her hands on. Predictably, she was unnerved by the experience of reading my mother’s words, an experience that is destined to disappoint because all possibility of responding is eliminated.

I asked my sister the same question I ask myself: Why would you want to read about her fights with us, or our father, her friends, or herself, or the ways she could never quite ameliorate the misgivings she had regarding all those usual suspects: her weight, her career—or lack thereof—the people who disappointed her or the fulfillment that eluded her, or her ongoing, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the early loss of her mother, et cetera?

I don’t need to read about those things in part because I saw so much of them as they unfolded in real time. I remain grateful that I was able, as I slouched toward maturity, to be an open ear and ally. Instead of requiring support the way only a child understands, I had the opportunity to reciprocate; to encourage her and listen as often and best as I could. I told her the hard work had already been done, and her efforts and dedication were beyond reproach. All you need to do now, I’d say, is focus on the rest of your life: be a grandmother, develop some new hobbies, and enjoy the peace you’ve struggled to earn. This was, as is the case with most of us—particularly homemakers whose children have left home—a work in progress. Progress was being made, and then cancer came calling.

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Empty Pages, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Traffic