Matthew Duersten 8/1/10
Sometimes, we have dreams that sum up our entire lives up until now, and our fears of how things might be down the road.
To whit: My father, who passed away nearly 30 years ago, and my 82-year old mother are out at an opulent steakhouse called The Corner House in my hometown, an industrial town on the shores of Lake Michigan. I am the age I am now. My father is not the skeletal shell hooked up to massive green oxygen tanks that he was in the last year of his life -- his papery skin the color of rotted egg yolk -- but the vibrant, raffish, hard-drinking, hard-smoking raconteur he was in the middle of his life. (My father looked a lot like Groucho Marx during his You Bet Your Life years, sans cigar.) We’re seated at a red leather booth with a white tablecloth and candlelit dishes of sour cream and butter. I look at my father with amazement: There he IS. I can't believe my luck. I have so much to say to you, I say. I can't believe you are here! He smiles and pats my hand. I know, he says, I know, calm down now. My mother looks at her strapping men and just beams.
The waiter isn't arriving. I decide to go to the lounge to get drinks for all of us: double-olived martini for my dad, dry white wine for my mom, a German wheat beer for myself. Standing at the bar, I hear a commotion, one of those things you feel rather than hear. Something is not right behind me. I look over and my mother has collapsed from her chair onto the floor. Waiters and other patrons converge to help her. My father is nowhere to be seen. I drop my money and rush over to where she lays on the carpet, gently easing aside those who are trying to assist her. None of them had any faces.
I help my mother up. She is shaky, disoriented. I'll go get dad, I say. Mom isn't making any sense. Her sentences are disjointed. She is babbling random phrases, confused as to why the words coming out of her mouth are not in the order she intended. I look around the restaurant. Dad is gone. Hmmm. Now I have two jobs. I don't want to leave my mother with strangers, but I have to find Dad. I ask Mom, Do you want me to call an ambulance? Do you want to go to the hospital? Do you want me to drive us all home? (I am the youngest in the family, but I see it as my responsibility.) Mom seems like she is speaking in tongues. Her eyes are unfocused. I plead with someone at another table if they could please call 911 and look after Mom. Mom, stay here, I say quietly, I need to go find Dad. I wander through the dark restaurant; all of the patrons sit at tables with candlelight and no faces. Some of them begin to chant in an unhinged fashion. Their heads follow me as I walk into an adjacent banquet annex. I spot my father sitting at a table alone, a few empty cocktail glasses and a cigarette’s red tip glowing in an ashtray in front of him. Dad, I say, something’s wrong with mom. Could you please come? He can't seem to hear me and for some reason I am unable to approach his table. Dad, please. He orders another martini and takes a drag on his smoke, holding it between thumb and forefinger in the European manner, which was his way. His face had grown dark and silent, engulfed in the dark and smoke. Dad, I scream.
I run back to my mother and help her out of her seat. She’s clinging to my arm, her long fingernails digging into my bones. She is still babbling like a child. Nothing seems right. The very air feels evil and toxic.
I help her back to the car and put her inside. The door closes behind her and the car, a white Acura, slowly pulls away and floats down the street like a ghostly carriage. I can see the silhouette of my mother's head in the car as it disappears into the thick fog.
Then, a switch in mood and tempo that can only happen in dreams: okay, the family part of the evening is over, time to par-taaaay! I make my way back into the steakhouse, which now is transformed into a rowdy smoke filled tavern, the kind that can only exist in Wisconsin. Pool tables, girls dancing on the bar to Nelly's "Hot in Herre," laughing, dancing, swearing, clinking bottles, the click and sizzle of cigarettes being lit. I run into two friends of mine, hipster friends who I never felt comfortable with because of their frequent confusing of my kindness with weakness, who have that peculiar LA quality of meeting up at the beginning of the eve and then disappearing separately at the end of it, leaving me all alone. They greet me with bro-hugs (grab hand, pull towards you, bump shoulders, single pat on back, pull away quickly). I’m trying to forget the first part of the night. I’m terrified they’ll leave me behind. I feel needy and clingy yet these are the wrong people to be that around. We order shot after shot with beer chasers, slamming the glasses back down on the damp bar and going, Ahhhhhhhhhrrrrr. We speak in fake Irish accents.
I spot adult film star Nina Hartley winding her way through the crowd. I manage to say hi to her and ask if she remembers me interviewing her at the Adult Film Expo of 1999. She says she does and I ask, Why did you move to Racine, Wisconsin? She replies, Because I'm not in The Biz anymore. I wanted to go somewhere where no one knew me. Unfortunately, all the men in the bar are staring at her with drunken lust and/or vague recognition. I congratulate her on her marvelous career and turned towards my friends, who are now behind the bar tending drinks along with my favorite comedian Patton Oswalt (the voice of Remy the Rat in Ratatouille). My friend John is getting along famously with Patton because he doesn't know who he is; everything John says Patton laughs at and slaps him on the back. I keep trying to get into their conversation, but Patton keep looking at me and looking back at John with this ‘who is this ‘tard’ look? I know Patton is a comic book geek and I used to be.
What kind of comics did you pick up lately? I ask Patton as he washes a beer mug.
I don't do single comics he says, not meeting my eye. I only pick up those collectors’ box sets.
Oh like the Complete Incredible Hulk, the bound edition that's as big as the Oxford English Dictionary?
Something like that.
They are more like objet d'art, I venture, mispronouncing the word "'dee-art." Patton looks at me and then at John, who snaps him with a bar towel playfully.
It is getting late, close to the cruelest hour of the night: Bar Time. I think I had better call home and see if mom has made it home okay and ask where is Dad? I pull my cellphone out of my dinner jacket, but it isn't my cell phone: it’s an impossibly old model that looks more like a TV remote, covered in dust. I reach into every pocket and pull out a cellphone, all of them different, all of them not mine. I line them up on the bar. My phone is gone. I venture outside the bar for a cig; the early morning mist off the lake has completely engulfed downtown. The street my mother has disappeared down has been obliterated by fog. I cannot see one building, not one streetlamp, not one person past that gauntlet of white mist. I feel desperate and terrified. I can’t go out there. I can’t leave this bar. Where is Dad? Where is Mom? I don’t know why I think I can't leave. I just know I could not go out into the dark and the fog and the cold. I’m not ready. I haven’t done anything wrong and yet I feel that I have, that I am guilty of something. Then I realize as my cigarette snuffs itself that I left my friends back in the bar and they might have left me. I feel nothing but terror.
I rush back inside and thankfully they are still there, drinking and laughing. Patton has left, so has Nina. In the middle of the dance floor is an enormous pyramid of abandoned shoes, old and weathered, sneakers, loafers, high heels, dancing pumps, combat boots, flip flops, orthopedic moccasins with flat wooden soles—all filthy dirty. Okay, a voice calls out, last call! Everyone in the bar begins to line up around the shoes, picking out their favorite ones and throwing them into a massive fireplace in the corner of the bar. I follow my friends in a conga line around the pile of shoes, not wanting it to be too obvious that I am tagging along, but they’re moving so fast, their arms around each other, laughing. Giant wasps float by with their long black legs dangling down, humming in sinister unison. I glance away for a second and when I look back my boys have disappeared out the back door. Shit. I run after them and they too have vanished. The bar patrons are on the street, laughing and getting into their cars. The mist is continuing to engulf the street, emitting a scent like someone set fire to all of the chemicals underneath their sink. I find my cellphone again and look down at the digital interface, wondering if I should call John and ask him where they are. But I know he would think that’s lame, that he would know I was uncool and clingy and needy and a tagalong. I can’t see any other way out. I don’t want to have lost my parents this evening and then have to go home without any friends. It couldn’t happen that way. It is too awful to contemplate.
Like when I came back from Red Lobster the night my father died, jacked up on Broiled Fisherman’s Platter and about eight orange Fantas. Mom and I came into the dark condo and the silence and blackness and emptiness of it towered over me like a ghostly ocean liner. Dad was here and then he wasn’t. There was no indication he even existed. Wiped clean by some deranged giant hand. I sat quivering on the carpet at a dark corner of the condo. The sense of nothingness, the grisly silence, froze my insides. I gazed through the blank wall into some sort of abyss of nada. The floor dropped out from under my ass. It was a moment I never wanted to repeat as long as I lived. Some questions need not be asked until the answers loomed too big.
Back in the Life Dream, I don’t want to go home. The fear is out there and not in my room this time. There is something terrifying about going out there. There is nothing out there. I don't know what had happened to Mom and Dad and yet I can’t bring myself to go and find them and be swallowed up in the smoke. I look at the wall of mist as it continues to swallow up the city. Unreal. Pulsating. Erotic.
I decide I can’t call my friends. Something about male pride. Are they really my friends or just drinking buddies? I decide to walk away from the fog. It’s early morning and the sun’s coming up, peaking through the telephone poles and firing up the tops of the abandoned factories. I walk towards the sun and suddenly I’m wearing tattered jean cutoffs. I wander past a gaffe of drunk Racine girls and hear them say: There goes a nice ass! I keep my head down, shamed. They begin following me: Give me a piece of that! Ohhh, I just want to grab that bouncy-bouncy-bouncy! For some reason, my left leg will not work properly. My mother had a stroke and I think she’s gone, I say to the sun. My leg feels like it is made of wood and I hobble like Long John Silver, limping into the light.
I woke up and rolled over in bed and felt like my entire waking day had been ruined by my dreaming night. I told my bed-mate: I don’t want to ever dream anything like that again. But I knew I would, someday. And I would fight it like a savage, knife between my teeth, for everything it had taken from me.
THE GIRLS OF RUBBERVILLE
Matthew Duersten 7/26/09
“I heard from my sister about this girl who this guy jumped out of the bushes and forced her to have a baby.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I think he just said, ‘Have a baby right now.’”
“Oh sure, Gilda. And you think that would work if I tried it on you?”
“Hey, don’t, okay? I just ate half a pizza.”
--from “Slumber Party” by Marilyn Suzanne Miller, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 1976
I’m not sure exactly what or where the educational split lies between current generations of horny American schoolkids and mine: the late seventies, early eighties. The last gasp of the sexual revolution and the advent of AIDS was not a very nice line to be straddling. It was like showing up for the Big Orgy we’d all been hearing about and finding all the participants wrapped in plastic.
For some time during that strange decade, a high school in my hometown had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the continental United States. After that, it was best known as the alma mater of NASA astronaut Laurel Clark, who died in the 2003 explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, and Paul Little, a.k.a. “Max Hardcore,” the notorious extreme porn director/actor/frequent felon. The town itself was a run-down dishwater-colored industrial burg on the shores of Lake Michigan; it was built on factory and labor time, scene of many great union struggles and dodgy ethnic tensions and inequities. The prime example was a Gangs of New York-style section of the city saddled with the unfortunate name “Rubberville.” RV boasted the cheapest low-rent housing available, essentially company barracks for the employees and their families at the rubber factories outside of town. I recall visiting my eccentric aunt—the kind of lady who had a welcome mat that said ‘GO AWAY’—a recluse all alone in her lakefront Victorian mansion where only one room was heated. Years after, I realized she was one of the inherited owners of one of the city’s biggest rubber pants. Again, it was a strange line to straddle, the descendant of landowners, the progeny of white-bread capitalism of the mid-century, the future of exploiters.
Which brings me in the long way to the strange line straddled by me, a “young man in the season of the rising sap” (thanks, Tom Wolfe!); thing was, it was those girls from the other side of the tracks, from foreign places like Rubberville and the “low-income” galleons that dotted the city, whom I pursued for being the most knowledgeable about certain things: cigarettes, music, life and of course, sex. Anything punky with a half-shaved head and tattered fishnets and tightly lace combat boots qualified. This morphed into an obsession with Madonna wannabes. They were only following the mantra of their heroine, who had brought sexuality back into the mainstream with a vengeance (or, as if she was out for vengeance). Thus, we watched this spectacle and took it out on the girls who modeled themselves after this monumentally unashamed and media-savvy hosebeast.
So imagine that: Madonna and AIDS, arriving at pretty much the same time. Add to this the still-pervasive threat of nuclear annihilation and you’ve got one mondo-confused decade to be a teenager. I can’t say I was typical, though. I was less a leader than a follower when it came to sexual matters: I let the girls lead. And even then it was tricky: one playmate of mine took me up to her room while our parents had coffee downstairs; she sat on the bed and crossed her legs and smiled at me; I smiled back; then she extended a beckoning finger and a come-hithery look in her brown eyes. Had I been remotely clued in I would have probably my first quasi-sexual experience at age 11. But I had no idea what was going on; I thought she was kidding and instead wandered over to admire her collection if 4H ribbons. I could still punch myself in the face.
This in the face of years of disgusting analogies from the boys on the corner that passed for Sex Ed even before I had my first Health class: “Go home and ask your Mom if she has a bald dick or a hairy cunt”; “When you pull your dick out of a pussy, you’ve got all this meaty gunk stuck on the end of it”; “When a chick comes, Starburst and M&Ms comes shooting out along with rainbows and little magic ponies.” Then, as is now, the majority of sexual education came in raggedly improvised and keenly awkward (not the cute kind) moments outside of any classroom: a passing sexy billboard ad of Brooke Shields; these mysteriously fat women who waddled around department stores and public squares (“with child” was how my mother put it); a dirty-kneed neighborhood girl who would raise her dress and grin whenever you’d ask.
But maybe I was lucky: I was hot for chicks in FIRST GRADE. (Quote from teacher’s comment sheet: “repeatedly disciplined for running around room, disrupting the lessons and repeatedly kissing female classmates.”) Yeah, I was a perv. But a completely squeaky-clean and innocent one. I even took up downhill skiing to impress a plump red-headed six-year-old named Rachel Gretebeck. Never laid a finger on her.
When I first learned about Sexually Transmitted Diseases, it was during a famous SNL sketch featuring Idi Amin in a commercial about syphilis. I asked my big sisters what this funny word was. After they told me, they exploded in laughter and rolled on the floor when I told them my plans for my new girlfriend Heather: “I guess I’m going to have to ask her on Monday if she has syphilis.” I didn’t even understand that it could not be spread by just kissing. Pregnancy was a similar—if more classically chaste—education. Babies annoyed me; pregnant women fascinated me (they all looked like that Virgin Mary broad in church). When I finally got my state-sanctioned “sex talk” it was with the usual pageantry: strangely tense teachers separating boys from girls into two platoons, death march to cafeteria, blinds pulled, introductions and pre-admonishments given (“Anyone who can’t act like mature young ladies and gentlemen will be immediately removed…”), lights off, blurry, vaguely irritating, stilted animated film shown with stupid title blissfully unaware of its own irony (“There’s A New You –A-Comin’!”), blinds up, light back on, questions solicited (none given), questions solicited with slightly more emphasis (none given), final call for questions (none given), exeunt cafeteria, reverse march back to classroom, lots of giggling and whispering, tons of silent questions.
If we had learned anything, it was that anything could be made into a sex joke: it was foolproof: “Hey, Janelle, are you coming over yet?”; “My, Kara, what big balloons you have!”; “Beth-Ann, are you going riding again this weekend?”; “Are you playing with your erector set?”
Health Class in those days was directed by a Mr. Healey, a Bantam-sized man with a porn-actor moustache, tinted aviator shades and all of the body hair that couldn’t fit on Robin Williams. Mr. Healey was the perfect man for this job: He wore jeans so tight one could see the wear marks around his crotch. We speculated that he had wear marks because whenever he explained the pneumatics of our own penises, he would use his left hand in a sort of swooping motion along his inseam, like he was a hand model demonstrating a mechanical gravy ladle on QVC. Were tried to listen, but we’d only catch stray words like “spongy” and “milky.” (More innocent words forever ruined.) We were always dead serious while Mr. Healey lectured using his dong as a ventriloquist’s dummy. He revealed the cold, clinical facts of love, baby-making and gross diseases underneath brain-frying florescent lights, the kind they use in bus stations and mental hospitals.
No wonder we sought out the levels of street knowledge—the endless debates over what a pussy actually felt like (no apple pie metaphors here); the furtive and embarrassing attempts at Truth or Dare? and Spin the Plastic Windex bottle; the plumbing of information from experienced young adults and getting horrified at the graphic quality of the information divulged; the meticulous tightrope dance done in certain pharmacy newsstands, grabbing a hold of that top copy of Hustler or Velvet or Club and stealing away to a part of the store where the giant convex eye couldn’t see to get lightning bolt-quick and completely unsatisfying glimpses of contents therein. (Once I did this I found I accidentally had hijacked a copy of Playgirl and had to map out a terrifying and humbling return to the magazine rack).
So, again, the line we, uh, straddled was that of the filthy ruthless discourse of “Da Streets” or the alien-abduction coldness of “Da School.” The vox populi way of getting one’s sex education was the only way. Health Class gave us the raw “tools” and we went out brought it to our world and mixed them up, misunderstood them, misinterpreted them, debated them, all on our own. With all respect to Planned Parenthood, the classroom couldn’t—and probably will never—trump the street: the official way was paved with fear and dread of open sores and preemies; the “underground” way, like liquor during Prohibition or homosex during the Fifties, was incomparably ours—and ours only.
I was luckier than most. I was a young gentleman, raised by parents significantly older than my friends’, but I went after the girls who came out of Rubberville and places like it. They smoked, they were salty, they wore tantalizing and provocative outfits, stalked rather than walked the school halls. They were the ones the rich-bitch Heather types gossiped about with wilder and wilder stories about basement orgies and abandoned-dugout gangbangs. They were deeply wounded and damaged girls as well. Just by the way they carried themselves that they knew a lot of things you didn’t know, rich mama’s boy, and they knew it, and they knew that you didn’t know jack shit about real life. This, combined with Mr. Healey’s imparted wisdom on the female reproductive system—that women in close proximity for long periods of time will shift their menstrual cycles to compliment each other—made them almost mystical creatures in my eyes. They would….educate me.
When It (finally) Came, it was with a carbon copy of Madonna, in a hotel room in London, at 17. She was covered in so many bracelets and necklaces that she jingled. I was a conscientious lover—years of absorbing Penthouse forum and softcore HBO porn had taught me to imagine myself as a chick and What would I want done to my fine-ass bod? I didn’t push anything; I was somewhat passive-aggressive. She was the one who piped up: “Are you going to take your pants off? I feel weird being the only naked one.” Yes, m’lady. Then I stopped: “Um, I don’t…uh, I don’t now how to, uh….get-get a rubber.” She put my face between her jingling wrists and said: “Forget about the rubber. lover.”
[Note: Columnist pauses for a nostalgia-based wank.]
And that was the mantra, the luckiest five words a man can hear. Virtually every girl I slept with in the years following was on the pill or carried some form of sperm killer. Then I started noticing a disturbing pattern towards the end of college. There wasn’t a lady I escorted who didn’t have a previous abortion. One had three. It was becoming like a rite of passage for American girls of the Eighties: first love, first abortion, first date rape, first sexually transmitted malady. The girls I slept with were still the wild blue-collar types, but they were shockingly nonchalant about using protection of any kind. Mostly, in the heat of passion, they would implore me to forget about it, they didn’t care: “Just do it now!!!!” One girl let me do her on the first date, before I even knew her last name, and didn’t even reveal she wasn’t using any contraception only until after our sinful deeds were completed. If my own personal sex education (“By Any Means Necessary 101”) had taught me anything, it was that when a woman wants you to do it, you do it. End of story. Our generations of liberated young ladies won’t tolerate anything less. I guess I sound a bit passive-aggressive, leaving the “choice” up to them, or at least convincing myself that I was. But I come from a generation when boys were taught that the girls were the ones really in charge when it came to these matters, which one of us in the herd they would choose. Those messages of respect and keep-it-in-your-pants may not have gotten through to some of my compadres in Gen-X, but it got through to me. In my own twisted, warped way.
Nowadays, the confusion thrown at the young ones seems similar to the ones we experienced back in the day—only, in the words of The Wire’s Slim Charles, “It just got more fierce.” On one side of the fence there’s “raunch culture” and sexting and cougar teachers and Bad Girls’ Club and Juno/Diablo Cody and “hooking up” and Jamie Lynn Spears and Paris Hilton getting sodomized through night-vision goggles on the Web and such new variations of the classic loophole defense (“Your mouth and ass can’t get pregnant, right?”). I mean, you can buy an RU-486 “abortion pill” AT A FUCKING COSTCO FOR GOD’S SAKES!!
Almost in direct proximity we have “purity rings” and the celebrity feti—the Jonas Brothers; tweenie Selena Gomez and American Idol Jordin Sparks—who fashionably endorse them. We have the media hysteria over the faux Gloucester, Massachusetts “pregnancy pact.” We have those creepy father-daughter “purity balls”(just imagine how creepy mother/son purity balls would be) and this new obsession with “the preservation of virginity”—there’s even something called “hymen repair,” which sounds like the kind of online porn that would haunt you forever. We have 22-year-old Natalie Dylan (not her real name) offering her virginity on the web for $3.8 million, a deal made even more bizarre (and less credible) by being brokered through Denis Hof’s Moonlight Bunny Ranch. Miss Dylan’s statements are almost a parody of Third Generation Feminist doublespeak: “It became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what's to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men. I took the ancient notion that a woman's virginity is priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism. Are you rolling your eyes?"
Yes, but out of sheer puzzlement. And you wanna talk doublespeak? Look at the fact that young Bristol Palin has become the deer-in-the-headlights for the New Abstinence movement, traveling o’er hill and dale preaching a contradictory message: I did, but you shouldn’t. The utter strangeness of it, the sheer futility of the gesture I’m sure is lost on many conservative abstinence advocates, particularly her mother. At least poor Bristol has enough class to look confused during her painful media appearances. She must know what the girls of Rubberville knew: that no matter what the dinner-table teachings, no matter what the educational tools waved in our faces, no matter what the political affiliation of our parental units, we are all left to fuck it up all on our own. In our own twisted, warped, entirely unique way. Every generation adds a new verse. Back to Top
THE LOST
By Matthew Duersten
Being caught up in the (inter)national euphoria over Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the most powerful brutha on earth was an easy thing to do – like falling backwards into crystalline-cool waters after years of bitter exile in the hot-throated desert. But let me pause during this massive tectonic shift that has occurred in our country to remember those we lost. Specifically, a close friend of mine who, one might say, was driven insane by the policies of our current President of the United States, George Walker Bush.
No, this isn’t (a) a joke; (b) a pretty story, or (c) uncommon.
I playfully call her “Buffy” for her blonde pixie-ish resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, her lounge-meets-goth fashion statements and love of slashing, depressive postpunk music (mixed in with a little Lucinda Williams). We met when she hired me for a shitty job in some anonymous office building in the shadow of the RAND Corporation, a massive military think tank in Santa Monica. Buffy and I bonded editing legal textbooks alongside a wizened ex-dancer now consigned to doing paste-up art. One day, this woman whirled slowly on her swivel chair and told us an exquisitely creepy tale of when she worked for RAND in the early 70s. She was invited by her co-workers to an informal "gathering" in an apartment in the San Fernando Valley. When she showed up that night, she was confronted with a roomful of what appeared to be crosslegged law students frantically but meticulously arranging large piles of documents in geometric patterns on the shag rugs as if caught up in some last-minute sprint to halt a death-penalty conviction. As the dancer told it, this was her introduction to Daniel Ellsberg's purloined Pentagon Papers, stolen from RAND’s offices that very week and leaked to a shocked nation that very month, bloodying the government’s crème-colored assessments of the Vietnam War and leading President Nixon to send a posse of inept black-ops to burglarize the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Buffy and I listened to this with rapt open mouths even as we debated its truthfulness. The dancer was of the batty spinster variety—she seemed to spot evil plots in her soup. Then, ironically, Buffy herself went to work for RAND around the same time George W. Bush prevailed in Florida. “The stolen election” itself was a messy, noxious affair that piqued even the most cautious of Left-leaning conspiracy theorists – but with Buff it was different. Her animosity towards #43 was a laserlike and logical bandwith.
It was also relentless. She sent out obsessive watchdog e-mails titled “The Bush Rant” with increasing bulk and regularity. Buffy’s husband of ten years, whom I will call Angel, began noticing she would arise predawn and spend more than three hours every morning fervently catching up on the exploits of W. and monitoring all of the Bush Watch websites like a boho Ashley Banfield. Angel, a quiet meditative surfer-type, would let her take center stage when she spoke of “secret” oil pipelines through Afghanistan and innocently detained civilians in Guantánamo Bay. Angel held equal animus with All Things Conservative but preferred indirect sort of critiques, such as recalling the peculiar sight of Neil Young in concert kvetching about the conservative media giant Clear Channel while a large “Sponsored by Clear Channel” hung above his head over the stage.
Angel seemed to sink deeper down into the couch as Buffy’s monologues became increasingly strident. But thanks to her, I was already aware of 90% of the content that would wind up in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11—particularly the Bush/Bin Laden family relationship through that weird Parallax View-ish consortium called the Carlyle Group and that the Saudis own about 7% of the United States. That a disastrous and immoral war in Iraq was zigzagging rudderless and leaderless while our Commander-in-Chief teed off and chopped wood like a retired CEO seemed obvious to everyone. But with Buffy, it was what she DIDN’T know that started to get on her like a friendly fat rapist. “Who knows how many people they’re detaining that we don’t know about?” she would ask us. She took it all personally. To her, the stomping on civil liberties and the vinegary callousness displayed by the Bush Administration towards the families of G.I.s killed in Iraq was so blatant, so undraped with nuance, and so splendiferously brittle and bullish in its message: Yeah, we're going to take y'all to war, what are you gonna do about it? You want some o’ this? The very fact that this taunt could be applied equally to both the American people as well as the Iraqi people seemed to indicate to her that it was open season on the powerless, everywhere.
“From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I’ve been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island,” the statement read. “I no longer feel in harmony with American culture.” This did not come from Buffy’s cursor, but from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist/writer/editor Art Spiegelman. He was speaking to the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera on his bitter resignation from The New Yorker after the magazine nixed his strip “In The Shadow of No Towers,” which concerns the author's memories of September 11 and a poisonous aftermath “in which one feels equally threatened by both Bush and bin Laden.” “Towers” was commissioned by the German newspaper Die Zeit, but here in the USA only one magazine, the Jewish journal The Forward agreed to publish it. (LA Weekly also reprinted portions.) Despite the provocative subject, part of reading the punishing, wounded “Towers” is that you feel you are watching Spiegelman come apart on the page. Spiegelman himself had nervous breakdown when he was still in college at SUNY-Binghamton and the combined roundhouse punches of 9/11 (he and his family live in the last block that wasn't sealed off when the towers collapsed) and it’s ensuing exploitation by the Bush administration as justification for beating the piss out of Iraq was probably not the best thing for a sensitive man’s nerves. After seeing Spiegelman speak at UCLA, Anthony Miller, a writer friend of mine, told me Spiegelman’s slow public meltdown was “symptomatic of the Left’s failure to come up with any viable alternative to what the Right is doing to the country.” “In The Shadow of No Towers,” he concluded, “is a work of great powerlessness.”
Like Spiegelman, Buffy seemed to be attempting in her own life such a similar synthesis of powerlessness, catharsis, activism and art. I did admire her screenplay idea about a low-level employee for a major government think tank who becomes an anti-war protester, is swept up by the Top Cop's security net, dropped into Camp X-Ray and labeled “American Taliban.” Guess you had to be there, but it sounded pretty good in the earnest way she described it. (Honestly, I was sure Ben Affleck would have accepted it without even reading it – which would be par for the course. But still.) Because she knew I occasionally wrote for the Weekly, she dragged me to a satiric revue staged in a basement called "The Patriot Acts," which, like the whole Left's response to the Bush presidency post-9/11, was creaky and half-formed and amateurish.
Buffy’s stridency combined with her finding refuge in artistic expression made me think of how it is the artists and other sensitives who are acutely plugged in to the thrashing ills and corporeal rot of their home country. It wasn’t just isolated to Art Spiegelman. I think of the late monologist Spaulding Gray, who returned to New York from Ireland after being mauled in a car accident on the very day of the 9/11 attacks. Good God, why wouldn’t he decide to take a dive in the Brooklyn River? I think of Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, who saw the massive, expedient claws of neoconservativism closing over the country during the Reagan Years and simply could not take it, committing suicide in 1989. I think of the Haymarket Bombings of 1886 in Chicago, which ended in the grisly public execution of four wrongly accused "anarchists.” (It would have been five if one of them hadn’t managed to blow himself up in his cell by chomping on a dynamite tube in his mouth.) The executions drove writer William Dean Howells into an acute and bottomless despair over his country's unstoppable tide of politically engineered blood lust. His anguished writings during the period reflect a deeply caring soul holding his head in his hands in despair in his study as the grandfather clock ticked maddeningly towards Bethlehem. I think of another Chicagoan, Jeff Tweedy of the American rock band Wilco. A man of often overweaning oversensitivity, Tweedy suffered through terrible migraines as well as stomach and panic attacks during the recording of their lauded 2000 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Tweedy's ills were related both to childhood illness as well as the trauma his own band was undergoing; yet listen to songs like "Ashes of American Flags" ("Tall buildings shake/voices escape/singing sad sad songs" and understand why the man felt compelled to puke his guts out. How could a man who wrote songs like that not be attuned to some dreaded elephant the rest of us can't, or won't, see? Was the man’s artistic antenna absorbing a sort of pre-dread the whole nation would experience ten months later, on September 11, 200? "We made a record about America," Tweedy told Rolling Stone six days after the attacks. "Now it feels like these personal moments are politicized in a way I couldn't have imagined.”
Although she managed to stay creative, Buffy’s Bush Rants grew more alarmed and, yes, alarming, after the launch of Gulf War II. It didn’t help that one of her dearest friends, one our co-workers at the publishing company, died after a decade-long fight with breast cancer; her friend was an equally vocal protester against the invasion of Iraq, and she died the month U.S. Forces crossed the border from Kuwait. Buffy’s daily work at RAND started to become a conduit by which global paranoia and an awful sense of world reckoning was siphoned from the Big Picture and packaged down into bite-size reports. In November 2003, she was assigned a project involving apocalyptic speculations on a possible terrorist attack with nuclear weapons on the city of Los Angeles – the findings of which Buffy would absorb, as her job consisted of putting such findings up on the Internet. This involved trolling terrorist websites. At home, she started to do lots of “ruminating,” which if done in excess can be quite dangerous, because the ruminations become ceaseless until one is turned to stone – or frightened for their very lives. Case in point: Buffy became convinced that terrorists were going to hit L.A. with a “dirty bomb” on November 19, 2003. She woke up Angel in the middle of the night and forced him to drive them both to a remote motel outside of the city for safety. They did this twice: once to go to Santa Maria; the next, Angel, though seriously sleep-deprived, managed to talk her down to Ventura. Buffy began imploring him to build a bomb shelter under their pre-fab house.
She was embarrassed and ashamed at all of the “trouble” she was causing for Angel and her family and everyone else. She became increasingly fragile. She took a short-term disability leave from RAND. Angel would be in his home office and turn his chair to see her standing in the hallway staring at him for hours on end, soundlessly, as if in a trance. She started constantly fidgeting and checking her skin. She wasn’t making sense. She’d replaced words with other words: “Look at that sky” would come out as “Look at that steak” or “Look at that steamroller.” It was as if she had absorbed all the Bush Administration double-speak she had been wading through for the last three years. Her heart was racing, she felt she was going to die. Angel would wake up at 2am and find the paramedics standing on his doorstep, hands on hips; then they’d leave and she’d call them again; then they would refuse to respond, she called the police; the police got fed up and pulled Angel aside and said, “She called 911, she’s your wife, she’s your responsibility.’” Angel shook his head when he related this, as if wincing at the distaste of these cops talking about his vulnerable and troubled wife like she was a poltergeist in need of a good, stiff exorcism.
Buffy rebelled, against the doctors, against Angel, convinced they were trying to poison her or make her part of this medical plot to pacify “activists” with psychopharmacology. She refused to take any medication prescribed to her. On recommendations from her therapist, Angel wound up driving his wife to the Acute Ward at UCLA Hospital. There was only one pay phone on the Ward and she could only talk for ten minutes. The other patients would time her, especially one bellicose lady I will call Cordelia, whom always announced she was getting ready to make a call but never quite did. “I have to go now, they’re yelling at me,” was a typical way of ending conversations with Buffy while she was on the ward. When she was in group therapy, most of her fellow patients were so doped that all they could do is sit and drool; Buffy wound up trying to comfort a young black girl from the ‘hood who had quite simply lost her mind after both her brother and cousin were killed in gang violence.
As it turned out, Buffy’s troubles had very little to do with world events, but were instead rubbed raw by them. “The whole ‘Bush Rant’ thing, the therapists told me, was just a manifestation of the illness,” Angel told me in a sad, deadened waft. This could not be? I thought. She sounded so passionate, her hatred of Bush so meticulously informed and righteous. I found myself thinking: Who are these doctors? What are their credentials? And if I keep asking questions like this will I wind up Buffy’s roommate, fighting with her over the pay phone in the Acute Ward?
Given this, it’s odd that Buffy’s symptoms became calmer when, aided by behavior-cognitive therapy, she finally assented to take her meds, when the President's approval ratings saw some serious rending by three-syllable names that refused to go away: Fallujah, Chalabi, Abu Ghraib, Al Sadr. When I spoke to Buff over the phone, I wanted something that would cheer her up, to give her something to look forward to. Michael Moore had just won the Palm D’Or for Fahrenheit 9/11, and I blurted out that she should take all the time she needed and make herself well again so we could all see it together when she got out (wincing at that last phrase). I want to go with her to this movie but I’m torn between this childish image of little Buffy the Giant Hunter, inspired by Moore’s rabble-rousin’, rising up against her demons and shattering their jaws with a swift and merciless swift-flying kick. Or, the images would piss her off to the point where she would have a relapse, and I would have to hear her quiet peep over the grainy pay phone at the Acute Ward: “Do you think my husband will still love me for all the trouble I’ve caused?”
Which is why I didn’t see Fahrenheit 9/11 when all my other friends did. Because Buffy was not in the right frame of mind. She even told her husband: “I want to prepare you for the possibility that I might die.” Angel was distraught. “I think she might have to go back in,” he confessed, his voice twisting and tightening like a rubber band. He told me one thing he learned from talking to Buffy’s doctors was that mental illness destroys the brain the way a heart attack destroys muscle or a stroke destroys the nervous system: each time Buffy comes back from the NPI there is a little less of her that what originally was. Here's the thing: Buffy had never hurt anyone. Neither of them had deserved this. Imagine Angel's feelings of having to finally, inexorably beginning the process of committing his beloved wife to a psychiatric institution. Imagine that first night alone, sitting in a lone house by the beach whose very walls were a standing reminder of the love that raised them was now a sentence with a perpetual question mark.
So there we are, Mr. Bush. I hold you personally responsible, you bloodless tick, you incompetent, bottom-feeding skink, for my poor friend's mental decline—someone who never had an unkind word to say about anyone and would not hurt a fly and ascribed to a personal philosophies of No Flies To Be Harmed. Oddly, it reminded me of the changes noted by family members and friends every time a soldier returns from active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, only to be relentlessly called out again, and again. Because, you know, eventually they don’t come back.
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