Where The Sucker Moon
A Collection Of Essays by Johannes Golden
Contents
***
On Not Caring
3
Once More Down Main Street
6
Moving
10
Sunlight Is For Wimps
16
Performance Spaces
20
On Not Caring
I find that I often struggle to no avail, even with the writing of this essay. I have
sat each night for the past week staring at the notes and corrections I, and others, have
written on the original version of this essay and have fretted and worried about finishing
it. The result of all this fretting, however, was not production, but was simply more
fretting:
“In a fight between you and the world, bet on the world.” 1
This is to say that the forces of the universe are such that no person can overcome them.
Take the physical laws of the universe. Every time one jumps, one is struggling against
gravity, and gravity wins every time. I find that this is something that I have accepted.
When I jump I do not expect to hit a cloud before coming back down, I know that there is
a limit to how high I will go.
I then imagine myself in the workplace as a person inclined to struggle. No matter
what situation I find myself in, I would still struggle to attain a higher and better one
Take the stockbroker who sets his initial goal to earn just enough to get by. Once he gets
to that position he wishes to reach yet another level of wealth, and then another, and so
on. This person is never completely sated. Even once this person has reached the top, has
become the CEO, there still is no feeling of completion. The excitement would have
come from the chase, and what can one chase from the top?
I like to think of struggle as wet cornstarch. Squeeze it and it will form a solid
mass, but relax and it becomes akin to a liquid and can be manipulated. When I observe
trees I see that they live in this relaxed manner:
1
Franz Kafka
“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live
than other things do”2
Trees do not struggle. They do not long to uproot themselves and walk like animals. No,
they stand in the forest swaying with the breeze, their leaves change with the seasons, and
they do not fight it. They are completely content with their situation. Whether they are in
the middle of concrete in the city, or in the manicured dirt of the park, or in the freedom
of the forest; they are content to allow nature to have power over them. In this age of
Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil, and myriad other venues for airing one’s complaints and
problems; it seems that we are inundated with the suffering of other people. It is an
undeniable fact that people do suffer, yet to make a spectacle of it does not appear to be
in anyone’s interest. Learn from the tree; on occasion a limb might break off in a heavy
storm, but the only complaint from the tree will be a creak, after that it will return to
silence. Even the death of the tree is beautiful. It lives a long life, then dies, falls into the
forest, and becomes part of the soil.
Caring too much simply creates tension, and because there is only so much one
can control, that tension is misplaced. Do not squeeze the starch, relax instead and let it
flow a little more freely:
“I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.”3
Caring too much is what creates the tension; not caring allows one to focus on the things
that are more important. To be at a desk job constantly chasing the promotion and the
raise drains one’s focus from the things that truly matter. The reason one sits at the desk
every day, theoretically, is to support one’s family; to earn money to allow one to do the
2
3
Willa Cather
Jack Kerouac
things one cares about. This money then goes, in part, to furthering the education of one’s
children, who end up on the same path. On this path the focus becomes too narrow, and
in the end it blocks out the opportunities to do what one truly cares about. Being as such,
one cannot fight for fortune as it is traditionally thought of:
“…it is better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man
who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her..”4
If every person is focused on beating down fortune, everyone focuses on winning instead
of getting what he needs. Take Kenneth Lay and his Enron cohorts, for example. They
focused so much on winning that they didn’t allow thousands of people, and in the end
themselves, to get what they needed. If they had instead acted a little more like a tree,
they might have been content with their earnings, and would not be in jail for the next
quarter of a century.
4
Niccolo Machiavelli
Once More Down Main Street
I’ve known Marilyn Monroe and James Dean for as long as my memory stretches
back. You might know them too if you’ve been to Sag Harbor. They don’t move a whole
lot, especially for such big stars. They stand there day after day, week after week,
unfazed by neither the summer torrent of the nouveau riche nor the dead quiet of the
winter. Marilyn stands there, knees gently bent – probably because her dress is too tight
to part them much – and smiles out at Main Street. It’s the type of smile that pleads
“Love Me” - the type you’re likely to find coming from any number of high school girls.
It is not the smile of the skilled tease; it appears to me to be more the smile of the girl
who can’t help but prey upon the desires of men. But this observation comes only now as
a retrospective readjustment of the original. Back when I when I first met Marilyn she
was just a happy lady behind the yellow mechanical horse.
Off her right shoulder stands James Dean, leaning against the wall, legs crossed.
His leather jacket hangs open and his arms are bent in front of him holding a cigarette in
the classic Rebel Without A Cause pose. He too smiles out at the street, but he doesn’t
need you to love him, he knows you do. Even the first time I met him, at around the age
of five, this was clear to me. Even though that cardboard cutout of James in the window
of the Five and Dime was faded, I could still imagine him walking down Main Street,
flicking his cigarette butt to side and ignoring the looks he got form the passersby.
Those cardboard cutouts have been faded for the fifteen odd years that I’ve
known them, and I don’t know how long they’ve been there, but maybe they’ve always
been faded, and if they weren’t, were they ever for sale? I wonder whether they once
were items that could be bought for five or ten cents. Now it seems incomprehensible that
no one would have bought them at such a price, being that people usually pay thousands
of dollars to have cultural artifacts. Maybe the owner was simply a fan and decided to
pay homage in the best way that he was capable of. In any case, it seems poignant to me
that they’re faded, because all that truly remains of them is the collective memory that
people carry with them, and these memories are indeed faded. All stars that die young
stay young forever, yet the details of who they really were are no longer so clear. Jimi
Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Elvis (both Young and Fat), and John Lennon, amongst others,
have their frozen visages stationed across the globe on t-shirts, posters, and cardboard
cutouts.
That yellow mechanical horse Marilyn and James stand in front of has always
presented a bit of a quandary. I’ve always felt too old to actually ride it, even when I was
young. I never felt that I was actually part of the target audience for it, even when I did,
on occasion, ride it. It might have been that my brothers were certainly of age for it, and
I, being the older one, was by default not. I’d still throw in a quarter every now and again
when I had one in my pocket, or if my parents were close enough by so that I could
obtain one without too much hassle. In retrospect it really isn’t that great of a ride. Who
needs a horse that’s too weak, or perhaps too stupid, to even move down the street?
Placing the quarter in the slot was more of a penance: my commuter’s toll for walking
down Main Street. Every time I put a quarter in it went towards my Sag Harbor
citizenship.
But the horse isn’t yellow anymore, there’s a newfangled one there in its stead.
He still rides up and down, frozen in a perpetual state of gallop. He’s certainly more
realistically colored than the last one – I have never known a horse to be canary yellow but something about him is lost. It just seems that whoever put it there is trying too hard,
who would dare say that town needs an update? Someone tried to update town when they
tried to replace the old neon “Sag Harbor” sign on the movie theater, much to the
indignation of the townsfolk. Main Street wasn’t the same during the months when that
sign was down. Suddenly the cracks and the unevenness of the large white edifice of the
building became exposed. For the months that the sign was down, town just seemed a
little less vibrant, a little less perfect, a little less my home.
Even though the sign came back, it hasn’t been the same. It’s as if I noticed
someone’s acne on a day they didn’t use concealer, the next day the concealer may be on
again and the blemish covered over, but I can no longer help but notice the pimples.
There are the brownies, the teenage rent-a-cops who patrol Main Street during the
summer, causing traffic and writing tickets for the Lamborghinis that have been parked
for too long. They annoy everyone and intimidate no one (who’s scared if you don’t have
a gun these days?) Down on the water are the docks and the sailing community along
with the Breakwater Yacht Club where I sailed for two summers and bent a mast when
we capsized. Then there’s the 7-Eleven, glowing brightly, eternally contradicting the
seasons. In summer it feels like a slice of arctic winter, and in winter it feels as hot as a
summer day in the desert. Each of these, amongst myriad others, is a relic of my Sag
Harbor landscape.
This all comes to me as I sit drinking my coffee and feeling cool in the café in
Oxford, Connecticut. The girl behind the counter, he name tag reads Sonja, is rearranging
the quarters in the donation board. At first I thought she was heartless enough to be
slipping them into the tip jar, but I realized that she was simply flipping them around so
that the tails side was showing. I wonder if as a child she picked up a quarter from Main
Street and was enchanted by the eagle on the back and is now, far away from home,
paying her toll. There aren’t as many Eagles as there used to be, now it’s the Georgia
Peach, or trees being tapped for maple syrup in Vermont, or the first flight in North
Carolina faces the customers. The images on the backs of the coins remind me, as I sit
feeling a little homesick now, of my Main Street, and that I will live my life somewhere
between the smiles of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean; between that neediness and that
ice-cold confidence. The coins serve as reminders to anyone that visits the store that they
will always live on that old street, even as it turns into a faded cardboard cutout of a
memory.
Moving
Years after we had moved, we still called it The Big House.
Mr. West had The Junk Pile in front of his house. My parents always told us that we
couldn’t take anything from it.
The living room had the biggest window I’ve ever seen. It looked out onto the backyard
and it was beautiful, but I was sad when the birds hit it.
I was playing t-ball in the yard with DJ when I leaned over to pick up a small plastic clip
that had fallen off the t. He hit a home run, and then my face.
I remember Chris, he prefers Christopher, spending a good amount of time at the house
as it was being built. By the time I saw any of the semi-finished rooms I was just signing
off on an agreement. I didn’t care.
Grandma’s house in Sweden was home for a little while. I can’t place which house in
America I was living in at the time.
There was a berm in the back yard that had a few trees planted on the top of it. It might
be because of my fascination with words, but it was always clear to me that it was a
berm, not a hill. Perhaps the “berm” is the cause of my fascination with words.
One time Chris and I grabbed a couple things from The Junk Pile. We scurried back to
the two large pine trees in my yard and sat there in the shade. We had to put our
indeterminate rusty objects back in the pile, but Mom and Dad didn’t yell at or threaten
us.
I don’t think I’ve ever picked my own room. By the time we’ve moved in it’s always
been understood whose room was whose.
Maybe when my dad designed the house and the berm he designed it not to stymie
advancing tanks, as they were often used for, but rather to keep DJ out; the berm does
border his property. I was about twenty feet from it when my nose was split open by DJ’s
aluminum bat.
There’s always a battle for shotgun in the morning. Chris usually makes it out the door
first and gets the seat.
I remember my neighbor’s mom Lori crying outside The First Sag Harbor House. It was
strange; she was, after all, scary/crazy/a witch. When people asked me what exactly was
scary about her I was at a loss for words. My dad hugged her and consoled her.
We have moved so many times that I truly have trouble separating all the houses in my
memory.
I can drive now. I got my license some six months after I could have. I did it on one of
those same whims that encouraged me to rush out the door every once in a while for
shotgun, but only once in a while.
Our twelve-foot table is one of the pieces of furniture that has traveled with us for about
as long as I can remember. It makes home a home.
My neighbor and I bought a pair of radio headsets with the notion of fusing the two
houses together with technology. I only remember ever using them once.
When we were living in the Second and Third Sag Harbor Houses my dad was designing
and building a house for his brother. He did the same for my uncle years before when he
designed both the First House and my uncle’s house, which were side by side.
The first day of school in Sweden was a cold January day. I walked the fifteen minutes to
school with my dad that morning. The sky was pitch black, though the few feet of snow
on the sides of the path did an ample job of reflecting the light from the street lamps.
My phone rang and my dad told me to put on my headset. I sat on my stairwell and we
chatted: “What’re you doing?” “Uh, sitting on the steps.” It was the only place where we
could get reception.
Whenever I went to visit my uncle, driving down the joint driveway that eventually splits,
with one fork going to my uncle’s and one to the First House, I was always reminded of
the time I spent sledding in that driveway in a big snowstorm.
In Sweden my brothers went to an experimental school that was started by a good friend
of my mom, but I was too old and went to regular public school. Because of this my
brothers didn’t have to walk to school, and they got to sleep longer. It was alright though
because by walking I got experience more of Sweden than they did.
I remember climbing through the living room window out on to the deck in the First
House.
I remember my mom telling me to put the junk back on the pile, but I don’t remember my
dad saying anything.
At the Swedish school, in math class they didn’t have enough copies of the book for me,
so I used a different one. I didn’t mind, I still did the best on the test, but my mom didn’t
like the idea.
There was a brownish red stone floor in the kitchen of what I think is the second house
we lived in, a rental I believe.
Whenever we sit around the table the seating arrangements change. One of our parents
always sits at the head, usually my mom, and the rest of us sit where we like.
The superintendent of all the schools in Östersund, my mom’s hometown, where we were
living, is a friend, so when he had us over for dinner one night she mentioned that I had
to use a different math book, much to my embarrassment. His home, by the way, sported
the same headsets. They were in the box that they came in and also looked rather unused.
Whenever we move it’s easy to tell who packed which box. I tend to throw all my stuff in
as quickly as possible, while the ones my mom and Chris pack are usually easy to
identify by their orderliness, clear labeling and legible handwriting.
I don’t think I used that headset ever again. I was going to ask my dad to see if we could
figure out how to get longer reception for it so I wouldn’t have to sit on the stairs, but he
said we had a phone and that it worked better anyway.
Whatever room I end up with when we move turns out to be okay. In the Third Sag
Harbor House I was in the basement, but it was still nice because I had a view of the
water and my own door to the outside.
Moving next door was about the easiest move we’ve made. Everyone packed at their own
pace, and in their own style. Chris took his boxes first to the room he had already picked
out. I still have boxes left in my old room because we haven’t rented it yet.
In the third house (I think it was the third house), a rental as well, I remember throwing
up one the second floor near the stairwell. I remember being disgusted and fascinated by
it. Dad explained rather matter-of-factly that the reason I could recognize certain food
items was because it used to be my dinner. I remember my mom suggesting that I should
try to hit the toilet next time I get the urge.
I didn’t start looking at colleges until the end of the summer before senior year, I didn’t
feel like I had any reason to. People call college the big move, but I’ve been moving all
my life, and besides, it was still a year and half away. My mom yelled me at more than
once because I was doing my college applications too slowly. My dad didn’t really say
much about them.
One day Chris came into my room and tossed me my laundry, I just left it in the laundry
room - the laundry room is for laundry after all, and Chris will clean it anyway- and I saw
him scoping out the rooms for the next move, this one involving my going off to college.
“My couch would fit better in here” he mused. A little surprised I replied, “I’m not gone
yet. I haven’t even applied”
Sunlight is for Wimps
Freshman year. Those first few weeks of high school are something else, aren’t
they? After a couple of years stewing in hormonal agony I finally lead my fellow
classmate to The Promised Land of Older Girls (and Learning). Of course, the problem
with the Promised Land - as Moses before me discovered and generations to come will
discover as well – is that once you get there you have to wait outside. But that worked
out, because, you see, in that first year - before girls – I did a lot of homework.
Naturally, I navigated my way around the homework eventually and some time
around the end of freshman year was finally spending my time with girls - or at least
spending time hoping to spend time with girls, that dangerous first foothold over
homework. The battle between homework and girls was like a boxing match between Joe
Pesci and, well, a real boxer; Pesci might scrap for a round, but the only thing slowing the
outcome would be how long it took for the boxer to stop feeling bad for such a little guy
and to just knock him out.
Now I never boxed, wrestled, played football or any of those all-American sports
featured regularly on teen dramas. This may be because I’ve never been to a school that
offered any of these sports. It could also be because the aforementioned group I lead to
the Promised Land, well, we consisted of seven people – the biggest graduating class
ever, at the time.
I have been harboring a secret theory, however, that neither of these are the
reasons why I never starred in a teen drama or played those American sports; it’s because
I’m Swedish. Or Both Swedish and American. Or half Swedish. It’s hard to tell what I
am sometimes, but even on days when I decide I’m Swedish, people often still don’t
understand what I mean; we don’t make chocolate, we don’t make watches, and we don’t
offer good options for overseas banking, that’s Switzerland. However, if you would like
to get taxed at 50% and up, we got you covered. Those familiar with the Old Milwaukee
beer commercials always connect me with the Swedish Bikini Team, but that doesn’t
really work for me either; I don’t like shaving my legs and I don’t look good in a thong.
But fear not, there are plenty of very tall, very blond and very pretty people, and you can
even see them on the one day that the sun actually rises. The children run from bed, as
excited as Christmas morn, to get a glimpse of it because they can’t quite remember if it’s
actually real, they haven’t seen it in so long. After that the nation dives right back into it’s
Seasonally Affected Depression, though I’m not sure it’s right to call 364 days without
sunshine a season. Oh, and never say to a Swede that you’ll see them “bright” and early,
that’s just downright mean.
Aside from the stereotypes, there are certain seemingly reasonable expectations
people have of me when I tell them that I’m Swedish. For instance I met one gentleman,
a teacher, who had done his doctorate in Sweden on Centerpartiet, the centrist party in
the government. He started questioning me about it, but I quickly informed that I knew
little of Swedish politics, and, as long as we were making assumptions, I reminded him
that I was an apathetic teenager anyway. Besides, just because they speak English doesn’t
mean the typical teenager knows the capital of Montana – it’s Missoula right?
I wonder if it would make it a little easier if I just identified myself with IKEA,
that store with cool stuff that breaks a year after you buy it. However, if I do say I’m
IKEAN I don’t want people to think that everything made in Sweden is of bad quality
and breaks all the time – if you look closely that stuff’s actually made in China. Everyone
knows IKEA and that it’s Swedish so there would be little confusion about my true
nationality. Even with that cleared up, if someone doesn’t have the time to really get to
know me how will they decide if they like me or not? There aren’t any real stereotypes to
help make those snap decisions about Swedes, and if you don’t have stereotypes, what do
you really know about a person? Everyone knows that the Italians are fiery, the English
are reserved, and that the French smell, but the Swedes aren’t really anything.
Actually, I think I have story that might help categorize us: in the early 17th
century the king commissioned the Vasa ship as a grand display of Sweden’s power,
spending 5% of the GNP on it. On it’s maiden voyage, or maiden sinking, all three masts,
sixty four brass cannons, and four hundred and forty five passengers sank less than one
nautical mile from where it set off in the harbor. It was like the Titanic, but more
efficient; if you’re going to sink, why not do it close to home so that everyone can see it
and you don’t have to later suffer a subtitled Leonardo DiCaprio crying and flailing about
in the wreckage? So I guess you could say that we’re efficient, though everyone knows
that that title belongs to the Germans.
Another little story I do know about Sweden is how we picked our capital. When
the original one was destroyed in the 12th century the good people of Kalmstad did what
any civilized nation does when it needs a new capital: they put all of their valuables in a
hollowed out log, floated it out to sea, and decided that wherever that log ended up would
be the new location. The spot of the new capital was called Stockholm, Stockholm which
means, I think, “thank God that log didn’t get caught in a current and run aground in
Africa, for we are a delicate and fair skinned people.” In my younger years I attempted to
recreate the founding of Stockholm by sticking my most prized Lego in a Baby Ruth bar
and floating it in the bathtub. My fully Americanized parents didn’t quite understand the
nationalistic ceremony and switched me back to diapers, even at the age of four.
Now some of you may not realize this, but reindeer are real. I did see one get hit
by a Volvo once; seeing it’s bloody carcass lying there gave a whole new meaning to
Rudolph the “Red Nosed” Reindeer. They’re pretty heavy animals, I’m not sure where
exactly the whole flying thing came from, so it was a good thing the driver was in a
Volvo.
The Volvo is another product that people generally correctly recognize as being
Swedish. It’s a boxy, but safe and trusty car. Now that may be good to keep a new driver
safe, but for a guy that abandoned school for women it doesn’t really work. It’s not a car
for wooing women; it’s a car for starting a family – which is perhaps doubly why it’s not
a car for wooing. I’ll have to get a sexier car, but in lieu of that I guess I’ll just go back to
doing my homework.
Performance Spaces
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their entranes and exits;
And one man in his time plays many parts,” – As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7
I’m not sure whether it was getting up at 4am or of it was the leg cramps I got
from sitting in my seat with “extra leg room” that really reminded me that I was going on
a vacation. To top it off there’s a crying baby, and I want to tell it to be quiet. When the
parents decided to go on vacation why didn’t they leave the baby behind? I usually ask
myself when a baby starts bawling on a flight. Surely they don’t need to take it along to
catch some rays. I wonder whether I should, against my better judgment, vocalize my
question, but I stop myself and realize that before even the age of one I myself was taken
on a couple of trips and odds are I cried too. However, I didn’t stop myself just because
of the hypocrisy of my agitation, I would have stopped myself from saying anything even
if I had felt justified.
On a transatlantic flight it was nice to be able to lie down on the floor in a
sleeping bag and sleep, but now I’m older and I get to sit up and get cramps in my legs.
The exit row is always the biggest row in economy class, which could perhaps solve the
cramping problem, but you have to be big enough to operate the door. This means that
anyone sitting in that row is going to be a little wider and a little taller than the average
passenger. This seems to negate any possible extra comfort that would be gained by
having those few extra inches of space. A few inches of length are gained, but because
you have to sit with other large humans a few inches in width will be lost.
When the plane lands a good number of people clap. I can’t imagine that they
didn’t think that they wouldn’t actually make a safe landing (why get on the plane then?)
At least there’s someone there to appreciate the clapping, when people clap at movies I
wonder if they’re just wishing that they had been at the Theater instead.
I’m not sure if he was in the exit row or not, but a rather average looking man
wearing one of those flower print shirts that scream “I’m an American tourist” sitting a
row or two behind me on a small transit flight kept attempting to strike up a conversation
with a fairly attractive woman. She was rather monosyllabic in her replies, but he
persisted anyway. At one point he was explaining to her that whenever they travel, no
matter where in the world, they always seem to meet someone from his wife’s hometown
in Texas, which “can’t have 300 people in it.” “But I’ve never been to Texas,” replies the
woman. I couldn’t help but clap.
I’m sitting in Nassau Coliseum (they don’t pretend to have extra leg room here),
and half way through the opening act a girl in the row in front of me gets up and starts
dancing. I look around and I can see only one other person on my side of the stadium
that’s dancing and I think why in front of me? I have to lean around her to get a view of
the stage.
At this point I’m thoroughly annoyed. I can’t figure out why she won’t just sit
down like everyone else. Even worse is that at slow moments in a song she’ll attempt to
continue dancing. Points at which no normal person could find a beat or rhythm that they
could dance along with. She continues, apparently to her own rhythm, shaking and
writhing.
The most peculiar thing is that she has three seats to herself. It seems unlikely
that one person to her left and one person to her right would, out of all the thousands of
people, be missing by mere chance. It seems equally unlikely that she would buy three
seats simply for herself. 500 or more dollars seems like an awful lot to pay to do a little
dancing in a 2-foot by 9-foot space. Did she then plan to come with two friends who,
utterly embarrassed by her dancing antics at the last concert, decided to leave her at the
last moment?
Bob Dylan comes on with a band unrecognizable to me, and probably to the rest
of the crowd (certainly no one came to see them.) He plays some new songs, and then a
few classics, standing at the keyboard the whole time. The woman in front of me keeps
dancing, now in the aisle (I guess three seats just wasn’t enough), to songs I’d never
dreamed anyone could dance to; Tangled Up In Blue never struck me as a dance song
until then.
I notice, though, that she keeps stopping to let people pass her in the aisle, and I
find myself thinking quit crowding the dance floor! I’m on her side now, but I don’t
really know why. Dylan gets a standing ovation despite the dissatisfaction of some of the
people in the crowd. Drunken fans were yelling at him to “PICK UP THE FUCKING
GUITAR!”
The most famous and powerful seat dispute of all time is of course Rosa Parks’
refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white person when it stopped in front of the
Empire Theater in Montgomery, Alabama. Why would whites even set it up that way?
On the school bus the cool kids and the rebels always sit in the back. Then again, on
bigger busses that just means you’re sitting next to the bathroom. Now, sitting on the
back of the bus, as blacks had been forced to do, was not in and of itself a bad thing. It
was just another point of control and degradation.
There is something to be said for riding in the front, though; everybody wants to
ride “shotgun”. There are complex rules about when shotgun can be called, or once it has
been called whether someone else can take it by force. There’s nothing really that great
about sitting up front. You’re close to the radio, but the driver usually controls that
anyway, and you don’t get that much more leg room. I guess the one benefit would be
that you don’t have to touch anyone. The interest in riding shotgun could be a holdover
from the days when riding shotgun actually meant you were holding a shotgun, sitting in
the passenger seat of the stagecoach, guarding the precious cargo from robbers. It’s both
a show machismo and a way to keep everybody else out of your space to a much stronger
degree than just getting your own seat. What Rosa Parks said was that no one had a right
to keep her out of the space that should be equally shared by everyone. I wonder if
anyone clapped at the end of that fateful bus trip, it would have deserved it a lot more
than any pilot did for his ability to take autopilot all the way from JFK to Aruba.
The cab ride from the airport was rather unusual. The driver pulls up from a
couple hundred feet up the road, where he has been watching his colleagues play
dominoes. He shakes our hands and introduces himself as we enter the van. I don’t
usually expect such formality out of a cabbie – the name “cabbie” itself denotes a certain
informality. I appreciated the gesture; we were, after all, going to be spending the next
twenty minutes together.
The amount of time you spend in a place has a lot to do with how you interact
with other people that are in that space. In a bathroom, for instance, there is an obvious
self-consciousness about the fact that no one is supposed to say anything to anyone. If
you were to walk up to a urinal, you wouldn’t take the one next to someone else if it
could be avoided, and the most interaction anyone would have is perhaps a throat
clearing to make anyone else aware of his presence. In an elevator, a place where an even
shorter interval of time is spent together, there is generally a deathly silence, which is
even more awkward because there is no task at hand. In a cab, however, it is not at all
unusual to strike up a conversation with the driver if the drive is long enough. You might
get to know each other a little, if you’re getting picked up from the airport, a little local
history might be imparted. You become a friend of the cabbie and if you’re on vacation,
you give him a call when you need a ride again (at least back to the airport.)
There’s a similar situation with the barber: he needs you to like him along with
what he does to your hair so that you’ll keep coming back. Conversely, you need to keep
him interested so that he does not lose focus on your hair, so essentially exactly what you
talk about is in and of itself of no importance. This is not to say that it is as premeditated
and cynical as all that, but that there is a certain level of performance involved when
sharing space with people. With the cabbie and the barber it is that of pretending to have
something to say, and in the elevator and public bathroom the opposite.
Despite this it seems that attempts have been made to make conversation possible
in public bathrooms. Certain urinals have a divider between them to give some sort of
privacy, but they’re not tall enough to hinder anyone over the height of five foot six from
checking out their neighbor – if that’s what they’re supposed use is. So they’re really just
giving a false sense of security, moreover they are left low enough so that two men
standing next to each other could, if they so desired, converse with each other. There is,
however, no chance that a conversation could happen between people sitting next to each
other in separate stalls. If you’re in a stall next to another person then there’s just too
much privacy, and who knows what could be going behind those doors.
In a hospital a thin curtain often separates patients. They have the separation,
which suggests that they should not interact; yet they also potentially spend large
amounts of time with each other, a time in which two people might get to know each
other. Essentially they are sitting in the adjacent bathroom stalls for months. They can’t
see each other, but can hear, and in the worst cases, smell each other.
There was an olfactory Got Milk? ad campaign out in California. It consisted of
placing advertisements in bus stop shelters that contained strips of material that smelled
like fresh baked cookies. The idea behind this was that whenever someone has cookies
they want milk as well. Not many people took to this idea, however, for it simply made
commuters want cookies. This campaign was therefore scrapped almost as soon as it was
started. Is smell just too invasive, too powerful? Every day we are inundated with
advertisements overloaded with visual and aural stimuli, but hardly a soul complains.
Times Square is a shrine to this sensory overload; over two million people crowded into
it on the eve of Y2K, perhaps to get their last glimpse at the Great God of Neon before all
electricity went out forever. Imagine if all advertising contained an aroma; Times Square
would smell like Cup O’ Noodles and Coke. It is hard to imagine two million people
crowding together to get a whiff of that.
It’s funny the types of stories that come out around thanksgiving as we all crowd
around, eating, listening, talking, and seeing. Apparently about two years ago my uncle
was walking around the streets of New York City, his home, and a van pulled up to him.
It wasn’t a cab, and nobody shook his hand, instead a man inside asked him if he was
Jewish. He replied that he was, and he was promptly grabbed, thrown in the van, and had
a yarmulke and tallit thrown on him. Apparently a band of extreme Jews had accosted
him because he had not been giving the proper show of his Judaism.
The seating arrangement at thanksgiving is one of those things that remind me
that, hard as I try sometimes to not be, I’m still just one of the kids. This year I ended up
at the kids’ table (ages 25-14), and I find myself acting just a little younger than when I
sit with adults. I realize a little performance is taking place in both spaces, and it’s not
that either of them is false, but each space demands its level of maturity.
I’ve moved about a dozen times. I think because of this I haven’t really
accumulated a great glut of possessions. I personally own only the essentials: a bed,
toiletries, clothes, and books, I don’t even own a yarmulke (I better watch out for the
crazy Jew-bandits.) This could be why when people (you know, family) come over for
thanksgiving I don’t really know anyone. In moving did we forget to bring some people
along?
Sitting there so close to people who I’m so far away from creates its own tension
and the necessity for another level of performance. Second (third, fourth, twice
removed?) cousins who live in Oregon, and, from seemingly just as far away, based on
how often we see them, New Jersey. But it’s all necessary; to share a familial bond with
someone you don’t even know; to get over the baby crying on the plane; to get over that
crazy chick dancing in front you, and at the end of the performance to just get up and
clap.