Inarticulation in the Face of Fame and Beauty

I seem to have a knack for saying the wrong thing, especially when trying to speak to someone who is a little bit famous and a writer. I have a problem telling people that I saw them walking down the street or that I am having a bit of trouble getting through their novel, because it is a bit heavy. Or else I just feign disinterest, when really, I am supremely interested.

Last night I experienced an unfortunate introduction. Maybe if it would have happened earlier, when the room was less crowded, it would have gone more smoothly. If I would have been able to hear the attempt at the conversation I found myself in the midst of, maybe I would have been suave and known exactly what to say. But it is never the case. I am coming to realize that I am very socially awkward, to the point that some people I meet think I hate them, mostly because I just don't say anything at all.

I am not a conversation starter, so when my friend suddenly said, "This is my friend" and introduced me to the famous-in-certain-circles writer, all I could utter was a delayed "hi." I had seen her earlier, walking towards me down the street when I had to go back to my house for my wallet, and knew exactly who was approaching. I couldn't manage to get introduced any earlier. By the time I found myself standing face to face with this person, I had anticipated the meeting for too long. Strangely enough, it never even crossed my mind that a conversation might occur. I had no ammunition when it finally did.
"She bought your book," my friend yelled over the escalating din of the bar where a band was now setting up in the aftermath of the poets.
"Yes. I read it," was all I could seem to manage.
"What parts did you like?" she suddenly asked. And I had no response. There was no beautiful way to describe how I liked the fierce bits of her stories when she spoke her mind. Standing in front of this beatiful woman who writes wild and gritty poetry, I was floored. I don't like to think I am prone to speechlessness, because I am often quiet.
The words that I was least expecting came out of my mouth. I couldn't anticipate them, or dam them up before they emerged into the dimly lit room.
"I like the parts where you yell at people."
I don't think that was a comment that she was expecting either, and she had nothing to say, but maybe an "Ok" and an odd uncomfortable chuckle. She was feeling my discomfort, but she tried to bring the conversation back to a potentially more articulate subject. As a writer, I don't like to be known for inarticulation, but it happens sometimes.
"I will sign my book for you sometime." This was a safe subject, or so she thought.
"It's already signed, to someone else." The words fell out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying.
"Oh no, maybe I shouldn't have told you that." I try to take back my words before they hit her like a brand. If people have been selling their signed copies of her books to used bookstores around San Francisco maybe she shouldn't know. I suddenly remember that no one's birth name was written into the book. It was a nickname. This is even worse, because it is more intimate. It suddenly crosses my mind that someone else's bad energy toward this writer might be infused in my copy of her book. It probably belonged to a bitter ex-someone. She signed it to Farmer Boy in a broad, scrawling script that overtakes the whole page. Then she kissed the volume. Her fushia lipstick is emblazoned on the page for the life of the book. I own her kiss, but it wasn't intended for me. I bought it second hand.
"Who signed it?" She wants to know who rejected her words.
"I can't remember." It is a perpetual problem. I seem to be growing senile before my time and never can remember the details of any story I begin. "A specific name wasn't written in the book. It was more of a nick name." (I went right to my bookshelf upon arriving home to discover who exactly sold the book.)
"I want to see this book," she responded, now truly curious.

I will always be the awkward girl with the second-hand signed book to her, if she ever remembers me. I hope she won't remember what I said about liking the bits of her book where she yells at people. I want to be remembered as someone a who is little more in control of my own words. But after all, I was making an attempt to converse with this (at least locally) famous writer with a striking countenance who has the nerve to speak her mind, and write about her most intimate encounters with the world. This alone, is beautiful.

Tags:

• Shy
  
• Fame
  
• Famous Writer
  
  
  
  

Teenage Concert

Everyone in the band was about 18. They were having a great time pretending to be rock stars. Well, I guess they are rock stars, but they are only 18 and from some small town way up there in Northern California.The audience members were about the same age as the band. And they all thought they were uber hip. These girls with shag haircuts clung onto their equally shaggy haired boyfriends hiding behind greasy mops of bangs and black-rimmed glasses. They were all really into the music, or just the experience of being there. It gave them the vicarious sensation of being rock stars.

The band members were really into themselves. The bassist writhed around in some sort of caucauphonous musical estacy. He was probably on drugs, but he looked so clean, like he might be a Christian country-boy rocker getting high off of the noise like it is the voice of God. It was only cute because he was so young, just a kid.

I looked around at the audience, and knew that I looked just like all of them. I fit in. But I wanted to be above it all--to be someone a little more interesting, a little more unique than trendy.

The next two bands were terrible. One was just boring. The band members weren't trying to be rock stars at all. Maybe they didn't need to, because they already were, or they didn't want to be in the first place. The third band was pompous and their music was terrible. The lead singer writhed around with his guitar and made comments to his bandmates like "Stop messing with my stuff," when the bassist ostensibly caused a moment of noisy feedback between songs.

After two hours of bad music, Eisley finally took the stage. The audience stepped forward, filling all the small spaces between the people.

Tags:

• Eisley
  
• Great American Music Hall
  
  

To Break a Pinata with a Bone

He held the pinata over his head, dangling from the end of the coat rack on a piece of fishing line like colorful bait. Everyone took a turn pummeling the rainbow-colored papier mache donkey with a hollow plastic thigh bone, some remnant of a halloween costume that had made its way into the living room to serve its purpose as an important party utensil. We were all post-millenial stone-age kids in adult bodies beating this poor toy with a petroleum-derived bone. The birthday girl blind-folded and spun every participant in circles to make them sufficiently disoriented. Some people missed the pinata by feet. Others wailed on the cardboard, but failed to make a mark. The bone was just too weak. When my turn arrived, I grasped the bone. As I was being turned in circles, I tried to keep track of my direction. I thought I was pretty right-on. And I assumed my attack pose and everyone squealed. Someone pulled me in a different direction. I struck the donkey, but the bone only grazed its surface. The string broke before anyone cracked the donkey's body. K. made sure to egg everyone on sufficiently. "Come on wimp!" she yelled. "Get that bad donkey. Bad donkey!" The whole scene disturbed her and she made a joke about calling PETA and gay bashing. We pummeled this rainbow donkey pinata with our plastic bone until the coat rack broke into pieces. Then we started using the bone like a bat, playing living-room pinata baseball. Finally, it cracked and yellow caramels, rose tattoos, and rainbow pencils spilled out of the body of the toy.

Just Take Her Home

I think she just wanted me around for safety. Not that I could be of much help if danger walked our way. But it is always nice to know that you are not alone on the streets. I knew she had ulterior motives that didn't involve me, but for some reason, it didn't register. I only began to comprehend the situation once we were on our way to some horrible club in the Castro where everyone would be sweaty and drunk and dancing. I would rather have been in bed, but it was Friday night, and I was looking for adventure. The excursion at hand was not particularly adventure filled. We left one overcrowded bar packed with hundreds of drinking girls and headed to another bar full of hundreds of drinking boys.
Once at the club, we lost the people she came to find. It almost drove her to sulking that the object of her affection was proving to be allusive. The whole bar was filled with the powerful scent of vodka and other dangerous distillations. The unisex bathroom was wet, dirty, and filled with drunk men itching to have sex in the toilet stall. I never thought I would find myself at the front of the line. But then the aging butch dyke in a suit standing in line in front of me left in disgust with an exasperated "Never mind!" After she found her friends, we headed towards the dance floor. I wasn't in the mood. A swarthy, overweight man stood behind me with some expectation, but I didn't let him know that I even noticed he was there. She started dancing with the girl she was chasing that night. Or maybe the girl was chasing her. At least that is how I believed it began. I was immediately left out, and I knew it was time to head home, but I didn't have enough money for a taxi and I was trying to evaluate the danger of walking.
A bit later, I wished I had headed home at the first signs of affection between the two girls. They were reaching toward kisses on the dance floor, neck tucked into neck. It foreshadowed what was to follow.
The bar was closing. People were being ushered from the smoking room and toward the main entry. After regrouping with my small party, we stood for a moment near the top of the stairs. The other two began kissing, right there, in front of me. I didn't know if I should look away, or walk away. The act struck me as incredibly rude. Why didn't she just take the girl home hours before, because it was obviously what they both wanted. I waited a moment, hoping they would come up for air. It took longer than I had hoped, but finally they pulled away from one another for a minute.
"I'm going home," I said, and walked out the door.

Writing Erotica

It was an assignment. I couldn't take it less seriously because it was given by a friend rather than a teacher. We were supposed to be writing erotica in expectation of a reading themed around this particular seamy genre that will take place tonight. "I can't write something like that," I whined. "Just try," she intoned as if it wasn't really that hard to put fantasies on paper--ink meeting paper rather than skin meeting skin. It was hard. My excuse followed the lines of something like, "I am too repressed." But I don't think that is what I really meant. I meant: it is difficult to write about something infrequently imagined, pushed to the corner of the mind for years, something unknown, unimaginable, wrong.

The room was completely silent, and the few lamps positioned carefully in the corners of the room shed very little light. Basements are like that. And the music had been turned off at some point before we started to write. Once our pens met the pages of our notebooks, we didn't really say much, except when a flea jumped onto the hem of my white jacket. She was horrified at the prospect that her room might in fact contain insects when all of the animals were upstairs squawking in the living room.

I really didn't think I could write anything that might fit into the assigned genre. But once I began, the air in the room shifted. I saw only the page. And the words came out one by one, my scrawling letters piling up quickly upon the pages. Something happened and I was trapped in the past, all of the would haves stacking themselves up against eachother, forming a heavy ediface of mis-stepped fumblings toward another than only brought us further apart.

When I finished, I felt like I had cast a spell. I held this power, these words in front of me, and I read them. The words were heavy and electric. They were the spell and the result and the magic all rolled into one.

Last night, I wrote erotica.

At The Intersection of Hard and Luck

It’s hour three into this mess and the shrooms still
haven’t kicked in. 5 raw. Wait an hour. 5 more on
the half shell. Wait an hour and nothing. Cook the
rest up in tea and knock it back. Lemme back up. It
was Friday, so that meant cultivation. Carmencita and
I had this perfect little spot. Bombed out basement
at the intersection of Hard and Luck. Not one to blow
up my own spot – but it’s somewhere white people
shouldn’t be in a certain part of Oaktown. Open
breakout at the bottom of a city lightpole and that
was all the power I needed. Ran makeshift cable down
to the operation. It’s a basement and already dank.
All we needed was a lil heat and the spores. Been
working this lil caper for months and finally got the
golden tops to grow.

So you can see why I was less than amused when at hour
four I was still sober if not a little groggy - and oh
wait what’s that now? Finally. That old familiar
feeling. Like my brainstem just went zero G and my
heart is somewhere in my chucks.

Carmencita was no where to be found. Just as well.
Last time she cut off all my hair and let me wander
away…

Identity and Literature

I was the first person to enter the room aside from the woman, who organized the panel discussion of queer latina writers, and my friend who entered the room just a few steps ahead of me. But she was one of the panelists. She was supposed to be early, or at least on time. No one in this city, or any other city, seems to arrive at anything on time unless that thing is work. I am notorious for arriving everywhere five minutes early. Even people who don't even know me have remarked on this tendency. This time, I was at least fifteen minutes early. I really tried to be on time, or maybe even a little late, but even the art store couldn't distract me for long enough. So I entered the almost empty room and found a seat in the third row, right by the isle, where no one could block my view of the readers. I took my seat and watched the people begin to arrive. I didn't want to feel like some outsider voyeur of a culture richer in heritage than my own. I know that no other people's tribulations are to be taken lightly and that I can't hope to understand a culture that is not mine, but sometimes I just need to be somewhere to put myself and my position in this world into perspective. And I live in California. I should be able to understand my neighbors and know where my friends are coming from.

After a few minutes, more people were beginning to arrive. Two skinny white girls with short scruffy hair entered the room shyly holding each other's hands. They had no idea what was going on, but they decided to stick around. People were cutting into the cheese and munching on the apple slices on the table at the back of the room. And someone was trying to open a bottle of wine with a swiss army knife. I wasn't watching very closely, but it seemed as if about five people joined in the attempt to open the bottle. I think they were passing it around. Someone said "Your're a butch, give it a try" and gave it to some other woman who was standing in the huddle of bottle openers. She failed, like the other women who tried before her. "Now let the femmes try," the wine bottle opening party organizing suggested. After everyone had failed, and the femme had broken the cork off in the neck of the bottle, someone set it back on the table, unopened.

The reading started a half hour late, but by that time, the room was growing more populated. All of the writers began with introductions. Everyone had a well-endowed resume of accomplishments--histories of activism and filmmaking, publishing contracts, journalism degrees... And their work was fascinating, beautiful, tortured, complex, and well-honed. The audience had plenty of sigh-material and they used it amply. They were all women and unafraid to express their emotional reaction to the pieces that the four panelists read. After the reading which included poetry, personal essays, and fiction, both serious and humorous, the audience tried to ask questions. Most people didn't have much to say. We weren't all journalists. After chatting for a few minutes about writing and literary niches after the formal session was over, I extricated myself from the room and headed home wishing I could find a smaller niche to wedge myself into.