TRANSIT VISA : Yoko's Country

New York City,
February, 2012

I walk from Jim's old apartment on 70th street and Columbus Ave in the mornings to the bus stop on 72nd and Central Park West. The Dakota is now a massive landmark. Dark-suited sentinels stand guard at the formal entrance gate; behind them iron lamps with real gas look as if they have burned immemorially. The shy and awestruck arrive, mostly in romantic pairs, to photograph the exact spot where John last breathed. They all ask the same tentative question of the guards, as if they are the first to think of taking a picture there. We are talking about a  repeated proposition in the hundreds of thousands a year, and yet I have never seen the men who guard that memory be impatient with any of them.
    I didn't know that I would ever be this skint. I look up at the Dakota, now locked to me, as tour bus after tour bus arrives. I carry 18 quarters, 9 in each pocket of my coat. This is bus money from Jim, who has recently passed away to the same place as John - somewhere just below the ceiling of Jim's apartment, where I look up and say my 'Thank Yous' for small miracles like the change jar that I pillage, his pots and pans, his shampoos and ointments, his easy chair and radio, his bed and down quilt, his rent-free apartment. Thank you, Jim.
    Most of Jim's things remain in his apartment, although they've been sorted through. The books are ordered into categories: Mexico, Psychedelics, Poets and Fiction, Self-healing, which is a hard shelf to see because he ultimately didn't heal himself. The pictures and paintings that crowd the walls have post-it notes with friend's names attached. His button-down shirts hang neatly, if tightly, on wire hangers in the old built-in wardrobe.
    It's not easy to be here with my free-floating anxiety. I have slipped in-between again and am a sub-tenant, nervous that others in the building see me come and go. The landlord has stopped accepting the rent-controlled rent and there is bound to be a scuffle over the last remaining bohemian hold out. There have been no renovations here--ever. The wind whistles through gaps in the bathroom walls and floor. The shower curtain rod around the ancient claw footed tub is mended and held precariously with rusted wire. There really aren't any smooth surfaces in the place. The only additions have been made by the brown metal window mafia, but these are ill-fitted into their orifices and only add a further sadness to the place. It is gruesome and homey at the same time.
    For Jim there are are glowing, yellow, post-it squares on the only window emitting light. "You were the best," "We loved you so," are written in blue ink in children's hands.

 
I used to enter The Dakota through the service entrance. I rang a tiny bell on the side gate and walked down the sloping drive into the parking garage, which is a small city itself--an entire underground city block. We were as close to possibility as anything in those days. We marveled at John and Yoko's country--two identical apartments at the top of the world: one immaculate and white, where we removed our shoes and placed freshly laundered dropcloths down before we opened our cans of white paint; and the other the play apartment where music was made, and walls were splattered with color.
    We didn't understand in those days what a spiritual currency money was. We moved the gold records in our own hands. We hammered into walls to reveal the ancient, snaking electrical lines. We mixed Structolite and plaster in 5 gallon buckets on the kitchen floor. Our plaster knives flashed and hissed against the fresh compound on the walls.We suffered from the dust and labor and fatigue, but we had no ready rage yet.We sat for many lunches with Sean on his new deep purple wall-to-wall carpet, smelling of the special vegetable dyes, or on the frame of his new Balinese canopy bed. We talked about peace, and music, and the children that he taught, or the dark maroons, blues, and greens he had chosen for his new home.
    What did we think? At 17 to have your own apartment in the Dakota, across the hall from Roberta Flack? To set up house with your exotic model girlfriend? What did we think? I think we thought we were as close to that as anything. We believed in miracles. We had been raised to believe were first class, and we were only traveling steerage. I didn't know then that I would always be a usurper jumping the fence, not of class, but of the capital that made that kind of freedom possible. One rarely has any space at all to imagine when faced with the endless drama of lack.
    I really wonder, as I wait for the uptown bus, who has the bigger ego here? Is it Yoko, master of her own domain, raised without a flicker of financial worry, who took it for granted that she would always keep company with the most extraordinary artistic, financial, and spiritual people; or is it me, the woman surprised and demoralized by my inability to carve out a piece of Heaven as precious as hers? Which woman has the bigger ego? Is it the one who has the entitlement to dream, or the one who is grief stricken that she hasn't managed to live at the top of the Dakota? I am convinced that I could be magnanimous, and famous, and redeemed from that vantage too.
    But I remember the startling grief of some of Yoko's days, and her magnificent grace under inhuman pressure. I have never forgotten the story of the flowers. First you have to imagine just how big the parking caverns are below the Dakota, how deep the entrance, how high the ceilings. One could literally lose one's car. Next you need to imagine Yoko's view from the top, the vista out her windows, her careful white space, white curtains, white carpet, white couches, white piano.
    In the middle of the mayhem surrounding John's assassination, the press, the security, the lights and cameras...our boss, Michael, gets a call in the middle of the night, waking him out of sleep. "It's Yoko...," she says in that quiet, desperate way of hers.
    The dilemma: The entire basement of the Dakota was filled with flowers, hundreds of thousands of bouquets of flowers in tribute to John's life, with condolence cards attached. How could she answer them all? How could she sleep? How could she grieve in her penthouse while hundreds of thousands of bouquets of flowers withered slowly below her? It must have been a very cruel joke. But she had an idea. If Michael could call everyone he knew, and everyone she knew, maybe they could drive the flowers to every hospital and nursing home in the area before they died. And that is what they did. In van load after van load, tirelessly, ceaselessly so that her grief might be lighter.

These days I work in another penthouse on the upper west side. I don't ask how much this light and air costs. I am painting my oldest friend's apartment--we have known each other since we were 14! She has many homes, and I have wound up with none. From her expansive patio one sees the tip of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Spire, the edge of Central Park. At night one looks directly into the wall of windows and small patios in the low-income high rise across the street. Someone projects their flickering internet searches as high and wide as their living room wall. One keeps homing pigeons in wooden pens on his balcony, and they sit on the iron railing, coming and going freely. The tenant directly below has ripped and tied long strips of black plastic bags to his balcony bars, and they blow in the wind like the black scarecrows they were meant to resemble. These visual riches! Even the inherent lack of privacy doesn't discount the beauty of the multiple view, better than a book, a movie, a reality show--it is a building on the Upper West Side! And they have a perfect view down onto the huge private patio that only money can buy.
    These days I prefer to think of my high school friend and Yoko, both inheritors of great wealth, as patrons of the arts. I wonder that it has taken me this long to realize how friendship works. I have been judgmental, a purist, one who believes in fairy tales. I find it hard to believe that with my pride and hubris I still have friends at all, especially ones who will save me in desperate times. I pillage a dead man's change jar, and judge my friend's inherited wealth. I tell her what colors to paint her penthouse, how to arrange her furniture, what storage she needs. She has married, raised two children, owns many homes, businesses,and had hundreds of friends--and I really think she should listen to me, a woman experiencing penury, without a home, job, partner, children, or surviving dreams?! I ask my friend how I got here--didn't I used to have things? After all, she has known me almost my whole life. The answer is not so simple.
   
When I was 8 it was always Paul who stared back at me from the talisman object, the record cover. It was never George or John or Ringo. Surely Paul and I would marry. I didn't know that I would grow up and live as close as a neighbor to him in East Hampton, and glance at him in local cafes or the yoga studio. I didn't know I would never know what it felt like to be as adored by as many trillions. I know now that my mother encouraged me with charming falsehoods that must have seemed real to her in the sixties: You can do anything, be anything you want.

 
    I listened to Scorsese's documentary on George while I painted the penthouse kitchen wall a perfect shade of tangerine. Watching Harrison's slow burn at the end of his life was too much for me. Not much was mentioned about the fervor with which he pursued his periodic chemical and romantic addictions. It was only in the context of his insatiable search for truth that anything was said about these regular lapses from grace, when his addictions were visible in his gaunt cheeks, and his empty eyes, when he had no energy left for the search, and again relied on alternate means to get through his losses.
    I went out at lunch and found a high piece of Manhattan shale to perch on. The striations ran in sparkling rivers across the rock. No-one in the whole expanse of Central Park appeared to be complaining in the unnatural spring air. But tears came easily to me in my old stomping grounds, where years ago I had sought huge chunks of ecstasy. This is where I drank in excess, studied, dreamed, cried, feared--and lost. In a moment it was so clear to me: I still hadn't come to terms with my own death, and not coming to those deep terms shaped my life as much as the height of the Manhattan skyline was shaped by the depth of the shale underneath.
    The Harrison documentary was still with me and I knew George was giving out the gift of a new narrative: this search for relief from fear, and the journey through disillusionment with all the various forms of ecstasy, is such a human pursuit--maybe the only one.
    I might not have been able to hear his message at any other time but this one, where I had bet and lost it all: "It's OK. We all do this. It's going to be alright."
    How simple. Over the years my rage had dissipated enough to hear the truths, even across money and entitlement lines: "It's what you're giving out, not what you're taking in."
   
George was a mediation devotee. No matter how he got there, or what he ingested he was preparing a fear-free path to take at the moment of his death! He longed to join that buzzing bliss, to be a part of making a sunrise. His wife said that when he passed away the room was suddenly illumined. Sculpting a life and death like that out of the imperfect pieces...wow.

    I must remind myself that instead of standing under the Dakota and wailing: "Why me?!" I should say instead: "Why not me?" If a Beattle can suffer in his palace surrounded by gardens, music, money, love, and fame, then "Why not me?" If Yoko can and must suffer even at the top of the world, then: "Why not me?"

TRANSIT VISA: Down to the Thresholds

DOWN TO THE THRESHOLDS
Savannah, GA, February, 2012

I haven't talked to the man down the street. His presence on the block is big. It's his music that is our soundtrack now, cascading through all his open house portals. He screams in this way.
My brother doesn't mind the music. My brother says - He's in his pain body - ripping out shrubs, grinding stumps, wheeling all manner of things across his property in his wheelbarrow. My brother talks to him and reports - He's either going to put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger, or listen to REALLY loud music - Sounds reasonable when you only think of these two options.
He's actually bought and moved into the house he grew up in. (Read that sentence again.) Here, only steps away, he tackles the ghosts of his shredded marriage, the wife and kids he left behind, or that left him behind, in Hawaii of all places. He sweats it out, bringing the old brick place back to beginnings. He rips vines from the facade. He un-greens the entire sloping front lawn. He throws open all of the doors and windows, even the dormers in the attic. He takes no pauses as he moves from task to task. He is on the offensive.
I secretly envy the style of his disaster. He's decided to go down to The Crossroads and look the Devil in the eye. Not so that he can become a virtuoso musician, although that may be part of the package of this kind of suffering, but just to stay alive.
But how does he manage to ward off the evil eyes of the mommies on the block, who cluster across the street with their strollers and threaten to call the police?
I assume he is on heavy alternating doses of  speed and sedatives because of the way he moves. Because of the way he sweats. But I don't really know.
I tell my brother - He's on drugs - as if I really do know.
I don't know much, except second hand, about failure on this scale since I am always circling, ringing on the outskirts of blood-ties, a moving target.
I pretend to be what I look like, woman with a purpose riding across his territory on my bike. I allow myself only a glimpse at this speed. I weary myself enough to sleep with TV, Ambien, spurts of exercise and meditation. I re-frame my narrative in the mornings until I have enough courage to get out of bed.
In my odd moments of clarity I try out narratives on him.
I conceive of him ripping up floorboards to find or hide magical figurines between brick pilings on an earthy crawl space under his kitchen floor. I see him at night fixating on one loose spot of old wire that dangles from the corner of the living room ceiling. He stands abruptly on a chair and yanks. He yanks until he has pulled the wire across the length of the line where ceiling and wall meet. He pulls it up and over an archway following the line of the trim. Shards spit up from layers of paint that have hidden the ancient braided cord. He yanks until he has coils of the oddly springing stuff at his feet, like lassos that jump behind him as he moves through his rooms. He doesn't speak. When he finds the cord's final exit from the house he kneels. With his eyes closed he pushes himself through the hole in the wall following the trails worn by the tiny feet he hears at night scampering through interior passageways.

He has hacked his high bamboo back and now there is a visible pass-through, an actual path to his back property. It is a visual invitation. All of his gestures can be seen as invitations, but at a pitch only a counter pitch can detect. The music, the yard work, the open windows and doors, say 'welcome', but also 'beware.' One is stunned by the static generated, like an electric fence surrounding his property.

I feel the pull of him on my old mechanics: Man in desperate circumstances seeks hero-woman he can eventually discard when done. His gestures read come here/go away simultaneously. This is the pitch I've been trained to respond to since birth. It's a DNA match. I'm not so sure I don't send the exact complementary signals out to the world: Hero-woman rambles and needs to fixate on needy man in desperate circumstances who will discard her when done.

But who isn't in desperate circumstances? Woman quietly endures anxiety, doubt, and pain. She is alone, nearly penniless, in her brother's house in a strange city for the holidays. On the balmy 24th of December old Bing Crosby Christmas Carols careen out of the flung windows across the street. A cry for help? Hard to say how ironic the moment was. Their street was deserted, which made the music even more pointed - at something. And if they were the only two people left in the world on this day, why shouldn't she just walk over with a covered dish in her hands, arrive at his door, and say 'I understand?' But the perfect moment passed, as they do.

This is what would happen in the perfect world when I hear Bing's voice and walk across the street with an iced cake covered in tin foil. There's no answer when I ring the front bell. I walk around and take the entrance through the high bamboo. A warm wind rustles the papery leaves. Just then I hear the shot. I don't even throw the pyrex dish to the ground. I run into his clearing and see that his head isn't blown off. I am not afraid, even though he is brandishing a shotgun. He says something like - Jesus Christ! -And I say something like, - I made you a cake - and I hold it forward in my outstretched arms.
Our DNA strands lock. I help him bury the mole he shot. He promises never to do it again. We date slowly at first. I empty mixing bowls of his vomit, and press cold, wet towels to his forehead, while he gets off the speed and sedatives. I hold him while he weeps. He holds me while I weep. We like the same movies and TV shows. His kids come to visit and like me better than their mom. He has old Georgia money. We publish my book, which HBO picks up for a mini-series, although it's mainly about the mole.My brother says, - You guys were meant for each other - and he means it in a good way.

One night he takes his old acoustic guitar out of the case in the attic and his fingers fly, unstoppable, drowning out the warning horn of the oncoming train. Elegba rides on these metal finger tightropes. Elegba flies on these finger-picked notes.

It's not the Devil you meet at the crossroads, but it's patron saint, straight from Nigeria.  Elegba, trickster, jester, sits at the point of transition. He is the center of the crossroads, dwelling exactly at the decision point. He is the owner of all roads, doors, thresholds, all destiny and disorder. He is the time traveller who can speak in tongues, change genders, summon ancestors, and cure sickness. His mediation with the higher worlds makes things happen. He waits for you to meet the consequence of your choice. He is the roll of the dice and the numbers that fall.

TRANSIT VISA: God's Glue

God's Glue
Savannah, GA, January, 2012

'Nothing' is approaching us faster than we can imagine - that's what they say. It's got something to do with the rate of the universe's expansion. 'Nothing' is supposed is supposed to be a place. The place where all things are potential. Then you add Gravity to Nothing and all manner of things come into happening, especially Time.
Like this: I'm sitting in a parking lot on Abercorn Extension. I have a 100 question questionnaire to take in suite 208, to decide whether I am a viable candidate to be a PCA, personal care assistant for the home bound or elderly at Coastal Home Care. I imagine scenarios in which I cook a light lunch and read Proust out loud. I run errands in the family car and take careful walks with the patient at dusk. But I am afraid the tasks will be much less pleasant, involving bed pans and toenails. Yuck.
Back to Nothingness, which has always seemed like the easy way out for people who like to deal in opposites - since there is Something, there must also be Nothing. Even though I bristle at the oversimplification I try to contact a place as close to Nothing as I can humanly imagine. Each day I devote my 10-15 minutes in sitting silence, plugging in to a neutral place, without judgement, without consequence. No agendas!
From my sun bench in the circular park I can just see the pink stucco house that we live in on the corner, and the stop sign where we must stop and look both ways before we cross. There was a scene there last night - terrible. Serra clasped her arms around Nora's waist and wouldn't let go. I removed Serra twice, gingerly, from the older girl's waist. The older girl finally ran out of sight. 4.5 year old, Serra, wailed uncontrollably.
Just last night we watched the video of her parent's wedding. Everyone was there in younger, better versions. But where was Serra? You weren't born yet, we told her. Was I in another room? No. Was I in your tummy? No. Then the inevitable question - then - WHERE WAS I? Esma and I couldn't imagine how to tell her that she was 'Nowhere.'
This scientist on the radio talks rapidly, excitedly. I like him. He keeps saying: These things are worth celebrating. These things are worth celebrating! That we are fortunate enough to be here at exactly 13.7 billion years after the BIG BANG, (another concept I am quite resistant to), just in time, precisely in a spot from which we can still measure the evidence of it. And he talks of the Anthropic Idea - if all of the accidents of the laws of the universe hadn't lined up in just this arbitrary way, we wouldn't be here to ask these questions.
Time was on my side today, and the sun was co-operating. My half an hour in the car was expansive. I had the time to spare before I needed to go and answer my 100 questions. 2:45 by the NPR clock.

TRANSIT VISA: At Bay

AT BAY                                             

Potter’s Line Market, April 10, 2010

A calf was born!

“This night!” the Portuguese farmer yells across to me.

“Last night?” I ask.

“Yesterday night!”

His son tells me they had no idea the white cow was pregnant when they bought her. But just yesterday as we stood watching them in their pen Alex asked suddenly if she wasn’t pregnant. The mother is cream white with coal black eyes and ears. Her calf is all black with a wide belt of white around its middle. No one has seen anything like it.

In spite of this miracle I go up and out of the yard for a walk to strategize the means of my escape. Death is too good for me I decide. Besides, how would I do it? I crouch over, letting my crocodile tears hit the dirt, wishing urgently it was as easy to disappear as to be conceived – some shit about back to stardust and all that. I realize that all my strategies for keeping my depression at bay have been removed – yoga, money, meetings, friends, work – and I’m left with only my pills and powders. 

You were my last, best hope I want to say to him. All of my patience and tolerance is only for trade. I want my affection. This is all barter here, and I keep thinking – I don’t ask for much! I don’t ask for much!

 When Death moves off a bit I think of a third option between death and life - solitude. Beat the retreat. The elusive ashram! I tell him that’s the only thing I would throw him over for. The over-dramatic and elusive ashram.

TRANSIT VISA: On Captivity

ON CAPTIVITY                                 

Potter’s Line Market, April, 2010

The two new hogs are wilder looking than the others up the hill. Their bodies are huge barrels atop tottering hooves, their black fur porcupine coarse. They have flapping donkey ears that taper absurdly to delicate tips. One looks like a brown bear with a tan snout. She won’t come out of her shed much. When she does the male tries to mount her, even though they’ve just met. I come upon him having a loud guttural conversation with the other females through the far end of his fence. I knock on the side of the shed. Her head emerges. I open the metal gate and step in. I say hello and extend my palm close to the flat, grey end of her wet nose.

My jetlag finally owns me and I’ve come out here to cry for no reason other than I am lost in a new land. But these two giants have captivated me, as stars do, and stopped the rush of my tears. I barely notice the sheep, goats, or cows.

Captivity. It is a strange place for my heart to be - caged, set free, locked up again without warning. My man can’t always be kind. There is a visceral battle between staying and going – all that nonsense in me. I realize captivity means endless waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am sure, as the animals are, that I’ve come here for a reason, even if unfathomable. There is a greater plan at work, even if I only came for a connection with another. But I’m unable to be free. I am at my heart’s mercy, and will ride the highs and lows even if they take make me dizzy. I am as on guard as the hogs, and yet am making my place slowly in the pen, retreating to my shed, searching for scraps in the mud.

I wonder how the pigs’ days will pass with so few markers here, only kibble, mud, sleep. They are gorgeous to me, unimaginable creatures, even for story books. But I am the other; caged out. They won’t talk to me.

What’s the bottom line on captivity? He asks.

Human or animal? I say.

He says the captive is the only one who can set himself free. He says it’s possible that the animals are more evolved than us, and have given themselves to the bigger picture. It’s possible they feel sorry for humans and have decided to offer themselves up to us to get us out of our jams.

I consider the Zen eyes of the cows. They stand sideways, nose to nose, in their paddock in the sun. Only their heads turn to watch my progress across their line of vision.
I visit the black piglet locked in his shed at the far upper corner of the property. I touch his kibbles in the stone trough that enters the side wall. They are soggy. A pile of droppings the size and color of charcoal briquettes lies neatly in the corner. It’s not right for him to be alone, so far from the familiar sounds of the others. He won’t move from his place in the hay. He accepts my arrival by opening his eyes. I sing him a piglet song and he closes them.  
 

Bernard is grounded here. Who knows what forced him down?   The former pilot lives in a green metal shipping container next to the main gate. He’s been here at least fifteen years. He has squatter’s rights and cannot be put off. He has piled odd sections of scrap fence along the side of his house to camouflage it. My man says he’s like ivy, he can’t let anything go. He piles his growing collection of old packing boxes, broken pieces of stone, scraps of wood, dying plants next to his table on the patio. Rent payers get priority and my man has displaced him from the small workroom in order to paint masterpieces.

Bernard’s artwork is now carefully displayed, leaning against the patio wall. All of the paintings are faithful renderings of aircraft, including the one he won first place for 40 years ago and for which he received a trip to Munich.
 

If he finds you he will waylay you for ten minutes at least with his tales of the animal life on the compound, or with fifty year old stories in which his memory of the details is clear as a bell. I don’t mind him as much as the others, who see him as stealing from them rather than adding anything to the place. He does both simultaneously. I’m told he’s an old British racist. But my man says he listens to loud hip hop in his container at night. I see his entrance/ exit for the first time today as I catch him emerging from the small twists and turns of his scrap walls and high potted evergreens. He’s just woken and it’s more apparent how scrawny he is. He could be broken like a twig. His hair is a tangle of salt and pepper connecting to his beard. He carries a metal kettle and wears blue quilted slippers on the parking tarmac.

My man says living in this place is like living in a filling station in Barstow, and he’s right. The shower is downstairs off the communal office kitchen. I’ve bought a pair of black plastic slippers to stand in the grubby shower stall. The bottom fills quickly with cloudy water and begs to overflow its bounds. The old shampoo froths around my ankles. I ask him why the toilets don’t flush and the drains won’t drain here. English plumbing, he says.

It’s become clear to him that he cannot leave this country. He is captive to his young daughter’s charms, and they are many. Apple cheeks, squeals of delight, one-footed scooter and trampoline prodigality. He says this is the first time in his life he’s been loved unconditionally. On the nights she visits his room we move as shadows across her bedtime landscape, holding torches cupped in our palms. I go silently down to the kitchen for last toast or yoghurt, a last cigarette smoked under the extractor fan. I unlock the low metal gate across his door at the top of the stairs, and lock it again, always when she is here, in case she should fall out of his close circle of protection. She is two and a half. She does not understand captivity yet. Perhaps she never will.

I don’t know if I’m capable of riding out his bursts of anger. I ask him to be as gentle with me as he is with his daughter. Today we can’t make ourselves understood. I roll a cigarette and sit on a pile of two by six planks piled near the chicken pen. I smoke and look across the far low fields toward the canal. I have it all locked up in my throat, ready to spill. The taste of salt is already in my eyes. But the stallion in the farm across the road whinnies and rises up on his hinds at the two females who stand facing him, their noses through their separating fence.

I feel the wildness in me. I am ready to ride it into the future, the past, to collect all my sorrows into one pitch and hurl it out: I am a failure at love. I start to sob, but a hooting laughter escapes me. I see in a flash the enormity of the ridiculous situation. I have taken another huge gamble. I am far from home and in a no man’s land of emotion. I have flung myself out here into this new country with a man who may not be capable of liking me. I sob and laugh simultaneously, and every time I cackle the roosters give the ‘Cock a Doodle Doo!’ call of the morning, as their answer.

TRANSIT VISA: Spellbound

SPELLBOUND 
Potter’s Line Market April 8, 2010
Jasmine watches us eagerly, furtively, just as I watch her. We are both looking for clues as to how we fit in to our man’s great love.
I am asked into the big bed at night after my shower, after story time. Falling asleep next to Jasmine is one of the sweet things in life. She wrestles softly with her descent, sucking on her pacifier, rolling her limbs to touch each of us, to test our continuing reality. We are solid.
They told him to become the man he would want his daughter to marry. Jesus. It’s a tall order. He wakes us this morning with a gradual drawing of the skylight shades and the high melodious voice of the great Hawaiian singer whose name he can’t remember. Jasmine and I have extreme punk hairdos from our hot sleep. Daddy gets into her big girl’s bed with her and makes the morning a good, safe place to be. Bunnies and mouses and bears join in. He’s found his life’s work. I watch spellbound from my big girl’s bed.

Work goes on. The dog lies in the sun. Bernard is giving us a lesson in UK diesel as he scrapes the paint off his circular saw. Alex has been cutting his paintings down to size and the blade is covered in swaths of green and blue.
My emotional hemorrhage of yesterday morning has dissipated. We are back to bliss. The sun shines in Surrey! Paintings get painted! The pen hits the page!

TRANSIT VISA: Enough

ENOUGH 
Potter’s Line Market, April, 6, 2010

Tilly the Lab revels in the sun among cast off garden statuary, an elephant God sitting in meditation, and two Buddhas that flank the office entry way. She doesn’t stir, even for the mailman. The world still turns, moving the seasons in our favor. The birds are furiously chirping. The necessary writing dog lies at my feet.

I write these days in order to exonerate myself – here’s the proof that I have something of value to exchange for my deadbeat ways. Back in my country fires are smoldering. Student loan companies ring my Iphone in the dead of the English night. All of my years of accretions lie in a metal storage container, with only a tiny red lock keeping them from dispersal.

This is the only choice I’ve got. I must follow this emphatic man, this lover of life, this creator of possibility, this sum of my wishes.

We are here where Bernard finds his fallen cell phone blinking at the edge of the compound in the middle of the night, retrieves a torn guardian angel for him in the trash, and a tiny stuffed bunny for Jasmine on Easter.

If Polanski can be forgiven his unruly passions, can’t I? I must produce some kind of redemption.

And yet, in the mornings we lie as perfect as puzzle pieces in our dark ship. His hand slips over the curve in my waist, my head folds under his collar bone. Sometimes this is enough.

TRANSIT VISA: Conversations with John

CONVERSATIONS WITH JOHN                                                  6/30/11, Berlin

The day after I received the fantastic gift from Terrence Mallick, his film ‘Tree of Life’, I quit my daily intensive German course at Albert Einstein’s Volskhochschule, and gave up on my impatience and mounting fury at the German grammatical declensions, which no amount of explanation or charts could remedy – after all I am an intellectual, not a code breaker. I surveyed my situation from the film’s loving and broad perspective and saw that my time management problems were also of a spiritual nature. With limited time on the planet, increasingly cut in on by depression management, money management, relationship management, time carved out for writing was a critical issue and vital to my survival. My consciousness was raised by the film’s narrative to such an extent that I again pledged to devote myself to the written page. My writing to me, I realized, was as much of a gift, if not to the world at least to me, as Mallick’s vision and articulation in cinema form were his. But he could also change worlds. I reeled in amazement that such a feat could be accomplished in one small lifetime. With all odds against us and in our limited span, miracles still occurred.

Two weeks later I was rested and ready to see the film again. John and I sat in the Odeon Cinema, a wonderful, stinky old place, on a brutally hot afternoon to revisit Mallick’s country, where there was no dividing line between light and flesh, between time and immortality, where the water from a garden hose was the Virgin Mary’s vital element. I wept again the second time, sitting on the concrete steps outside, my head in my hands. All a fiction of light and shadow, only a rhythm projected against a dark screen – a seminal spiritual experience of my life.

Of course we went to have one of our long coffees and talked into the sun-drowsy night in the café society of Berlin. (I envy him his discipline of one coffee, enforced by the government dole. Europeans qualify for this social gift, this safety net, while Americans live in fear of old age.) The coffee arrives in glass tumblers, strong and so thick with cream that your spoon can stand up. This is where I write, think, and talk. To talk with John is to engage in a giant thing. On some days our minds are so simpatico that 2 or 3 hours are nothing, and we don’t even put a dent in all that we want to say.

We visited Mallick’s film again and pondered over his digitally created dinosaurs that appear smack in the middle of the film, the fact that human beings and human speech do not figure as the main subject of the film: John’s Evangelicalism, in Germany read: Catholicism,  and his wish to hold both ideas of creation in his head simultaneously; the Nazi ideal, the carefully selected clothing, the Egyptian swastika turned backwards, Leni Riefenstahl’s films of the Berlin Olympics, all of this careful PR for the ideal; Eugenics, the building at the Free University where Mengele sent his body parts, now a classroom building, but which still sports a giant metal Teutonic head over the main door; John Gotti’s old social club in Little Italy where I used to see him standing outside and wonder at the cliché costuming of gangsters in general – if they don’t want anyone to know, why do they dress like gangsters? – and onto Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the incarnation of evil and yet wearing their banal costumes, the dark suits that mimic the international businessman’s ideal; the looting of the Iraqi museums while the oil fields were guarded by US troops, the loss of the history of the Mesopotamian civilization; Mit Romney and the inherent contradiction between his candidacy and his religion’s pledge to always be at war with the US government; JFK; the Bin Ladens; Nixon losing to Kennedy because of his nervous sweating on the televised debate; our favorite televangelists, mine being Creflo Dollar, and one of both of our favorites, Janet Meyer; Dr. Phil; hoarding reality shows and their metaphor for emotional and spiritual change; the use of narrative and music in raising consciousness; Joseph Smith and the Mormon’s beginnings in divining and counterfeiting; black coffee vs. coffee with cream, the difference in the DNA between northern and southern people’s and their ability to digest dairy, John being half Swedish and half Lebanese he still prefers it black; emotional boundary demarcation; the 10^th step out of the 12; emotional sobriety; and finally sugar and it’s contribution to Candida and depression.

John tells me that the marshmallow is the most complete of all the sugar foods. I instruct him on the making of S’mores and he is rather disgusted. He explains, in his perfect Birmingham English, that the marshmallow is the closest thing to the mother’s breast. I am astounded. He says it’s because it fills the whole mouth. This is why it gives the closest approximation of the total and fulfilling bliss of the infant gratified at the mother’s nipple. I instruct him in the procedure for making sweet yams with baked marshmallows that Americans serve with their Thanksgiving meal.

“I am speechless,” he says.

“Wow,” I say. “Even God and Creation couldn’t make you speechless, but marshmallows…”

John's whole being evolves into a laugh that colors his face completely red.

TRANSIT VISA: The Present

The Past:
Potter's Line Market, April, 2010
Alex and I roll together in the present in his cubby-hole bed. We are happy in the present. I no longer taste the acid fear that was in his mouth in November. We were still falling with the world around us then, still feeling the descent. And what did I taste like on my own turf then?

     I’m trying to keep the past alive, even if only on life support, packed into a storage container. There are things in the deepest part that I haven’t seen for years, and that I can’t possibly need. I can’t keep up with the payments, but I can’t give that much of myself to the winds. I wrote Uncle Bob’s Storage an email – Dear Uncle Bob’s…and so forth – a plea for help in these uncertain times.

     There are six new lambs! Their parent’s faces are black stone. If we stay crouched long enough at the edge of their hut, a giant expressionless head butts them toward us from behind. The lambs are so new even the two goats post sentry to guard them. They are fresh cream with the farmer’s markers, splatters of lavender. Jasmine reaches her two and eight month old hand out to touch a soft head newer than hers.

     Alex said alright; let’s suffer in abject poverty together. He said come, and let’s see what we can do together. We lie on the trampoline and he says when it’s warm we’ll sleep out here with the animals, under the stars. Thank God that he sees me, that he’s the one to drink the last of my beauty.

TRANSIT VISA: Negotiation

NEGOTIATION

Montpellier Airport, April 3, 2010




I have never been so many places so close together in time proximity that I didn’t want to be! I sit on the floor of the gate with my back against the floor-to-ceiling glass. Some of us avoid the direct sunlight on the waiting room chairs, most suffer in silence.

I assumed that sooner or later a human being, me, would adjust to always being uncomfortable. But this isn’t the case. Every single place I have been lately I have adamantly, silently wanted out of! Even at Nissim’s on the Provencal mountain, in all that beauty. Even there, there were only moments of peace within myself.

I try to discern whether my discomfort is more about people than place. Without people: no noise, no interminable lines, no arguments, no security barriers, no judgments, no heat, no crowds, no broken English or French, no money problems, no smells.

I feel obligated to also list all of the good things that people add to life, but I can only ever come up with one: erotic physical contact. And beauty, or the creation of beauty, but beauty can be created in absentia and shipped.

How can such a lonely voyage be stuffed with so much unwanted human contact? I need a rest from humanity. I’m not very good at it. I hope the simple room I’m headed for is warm and quiet and full of touch. I need his touch, but the price is high. I must negotiate. That is the single most exhausting thing of all, negotiating for what we want and what we think we need.

TRANSIT VISA: Without Proof

3. WITHOUT PROOF Les Baux de Provence

Apr. 3, 2010


I was here. Now I can always say it, although my medium of proof ran out of battery power. Imagine being here without a charged camera! I was here. I had the obligatory three Euro grand café crème with a Gaulois cigarette. It was grey and cold. The giant porcelain copies of  indigenous bugs were for sale in every shop. They began their electronic buzzing and chirping when pedestrians tripped the sensors. The artisan shops were immaculately lit. The Gaulois burned too fast. The café was miniscule.

The small church swallowed me into its womb, blackened, dappled in candlelight. When my eyes adjusted I could see the details in the hand-blown colors of pieced window glass, the small iron carriage filled with hay. I misread the text to mean that the Prince of Monaco used it to carry him to his baptism. It's for the lamb. The lamb is carried, Nissim said.

My nose ran. The plaque across the alleyway lane read that Jeanne Mathieu had lived in this house for fifty years after having earned the Medalle de Resistance, among many other honors. All the cafes were open but no-one stopped.

Nissim dropped me here after chastising me for getting the absolutely wrong boxes for shipping my extra weight up north. He talks only of the poor Pope today, saddled with all his statute of limitations forgiven pedophile priests. It’s the end of Christianity! The beginning of the Muslim dream!

The wind blew so hard up here on this medieval rock that it rattled the metal rafters of the tarpaulin protecting me. I bought a cadeau for la petite Jasmine, just a sweet Provencal coloring book, not the figurines of three headed black dogs, or fire-breathing dragons, not lanced knights on horseback or blonde princesses wielding wands, though she would have probably liked them better. I’m on a three Euro budget.

I thought of lighting a candle for us, this constantly separated couple, in the church silence, the space where wishes might be heard, but decided against it as if it might be a taboo.

Nissim is angry andjovial by turns.Over breakfast he told me about the mistake I had made in keeping to myself in the small cottage when I arrived. He wanted to know if I realized that we hadn’t had a conversation before! he told me: In the North Pole you eat together! I apologized for my former exhaustion, my loneliness here cured only by more solitude, the American way of not wanting to bother others, to keep to one self. I reminded him that we had conversed. But not about art!Not about beauty and literature and life! I said I thought art might be the only thing that keeps people alive, and he agreed. But on the subject of film he raged in front of his giant fire. He could care less!! And why should he?!

I wonder if my sentence to wander as a guest from place to place, in and out of other's whims and moods, isn’t my tithe for being a writer. But I was here. I can always say that. Sitting apart, scribbling. wondering if those passing, seeing me in my cape with pen in hand, take me for part of the place.

TRANSIT VISA: The Five Euro Plate

2. THE FIVE EURO PLATE Montpellier Station. Apr. 2, 2010

It’s not that I mind the five Euro plate. I like a cafeteria where you choose exactly what and how much you want. Here you hand your ticket over and a plate comes back with your meat, and its unlimited return for the vegetables! I like seeing other’s plates piled absurdly high and sprinkled at the last with fries. What I mind, I realize, is having to eat it with all the others who are reduced to this circumstance.

I understand that money is the exchange for respite from these realities. At 47 I can admit that I couldn’t bear this sentence forever - to be attendant on all this misery. Call it what you want – a pessimistic bent, PMS – the hordes here are not easily swallowed.

I could even live on the two Euro plate in solitude. But here I notice the immigrant daughter, slightly risen from the terms of employment of her father, who sits across from her with adoring eyes, covered in plaster dust with his knee pads still on; the fat Muslim mamas swallowed in their robes, pushing wailing children with their trays atop the strollers. I can’t help interpreting the lives eating next to me. That’s my job.I focus on the misshapen head of the boy eating alone in his stained polo shirt. I want to howl. But I am here too.

I can’t be a pessimist. I believe in eternal life, the loving turning of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of all beings, the power of the spirit, romance, even in magic. I’m one of the good guys.

Three quarters through my plate of fried fish, overcooked spinach and oily potatoes I start to notice again the good cheer of the other people in the crowded underground room. The non-stop jabbering in sing-song syllabic French no longer makes me want to run myself through with a knife. I forget again that the décor is that of a cheap Vegas motel. The heat is still stifling, but I see the lovely creases underneath the older men’s eyes. There is bravery and tenacity here. The old ladies’ ice cream sundaes are processed across the carpeted floor like jewels.

Could it be that my ill will was the result of an empty stomach? Was I only hungry?

TRANSIT VISA: Tunnel Entrance

1. TUNNEL ENTRANCE Montpellier, Apr. 1, 2010

My smoking balcony looks over the tunnel entrance, allowing cars to avoid the maelstrom of the Place De Comedie. In the corners of the giant square the militant homeless ignore the expensive cafes. Real gypsy arms saw real gypsy violins; they accompany canned ambience from toy amps they’ve bungeed to luggage carts. There’s even a hideously placed carousel that’s in every one’s way, jangling an incessant tune, never carrying a rider.

From my perch I can just see the edge of the opera, a huge stone edifice where the zonked out part of the population congregates on the front and back steps with their tall cans of beer, their heads bobbing, sedate attack breeds tied to their waists with rope. I suppose it is simply that the public toilets are in the caverns below, but it’s appropriate that this selection of misfits lingers like stage extras here, at the foot of this reservoir of ancient drama, within shouting distance of the impossible highs, and desperate lows of lyric art.

Near dusk I watch an unlikely pair take their positions behind the camouflage of the high tunnel sign which gives white lit directions to other places - Nimes, Ales, Place de Corum. It seems impossible they cant feel me as I watch, that they still feel concealed enough to deftly perform their ritual on top of the interstitial roar of tunnel traffic. Her stripe of purple hair, her military style, his heavy shuffle - her arm finds his proffered neck and inserts the syringe. They freeze in the stillness of that long gesture. But it has to be done again, and he strips his black sweatshirt over his head in one move, and his black undershirt. She must be able to find a better vein this way, naked from the waist cold in the Montpellier wind. It ‘s over quickly.

Their dog waits, tied at a distance, understanding everything - his beautiful black and white head, upright like a sphinx between his paws - understanding nothing.