dusk
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts
Monday, July 12, 2010
TOY STORY
A dinner plate with a salmon burger on it,
slides out of the open refrigerator, tumbles to the floor, and shatters into five or six jagged shapes.
I stop and consider the mess.
I am stuck. I can't just roll over it (on my new borrowed wheel chair)...
so I call Jackie.
"Jackie, I've had a SMALL little disaster... I broke something, can you come over?"
(I emphasize "small" to make sure she understands this episode won't be a three hour ordeal - like last week when I fell in the bathroom toilet and Jackie wandered around the building looking for someone strong enough to lift me out of it).
"Alright, I'll be right ovah."
Jackie sounds drowsy and hesitant. "Sixty Minutes" is on in the background. It's dinnertime.
As I wait for Jackie, I stare at the broken pieces, the sludge of salmon, on the dirty tile floor.
Above an oily crescent shard, near the doorway, I fixate on a dirty string (of something); a rotting remnant of spinach or kale? No. It's a gold chain with a pearl. It's Jackie's. She's been missing it for days.
"It's a sign!" Jackie says. "What does it mean, Charlie? This plate was meant to be broken. Everything happens for a reason."
But I'm not able to join in her mystical enthusiasm. I feel weak. I'm hungry. It's difficult to talk. (I'm losing my strength to talk). Jackie requires answers but all I offer are lopsided smiles and and weak nods. Jackie is carried away by her own charisma so it doesn't seem to bother her.
After Jackie exits, and after I swallow some food, I decide to go to the movies. "Toy Story 3" has rave reviews. I'll wheelchair to 42nd and Eighth for the ten o'clock showing. I buckle the safety belt and begin my sojourn.
As I wheel away from the Hudson east to Time Square, the city becomes sinister.
There's something not right about 42nd Street. It doesn't know what it's supposed to be (anymore).
I wheel past spectacular brand-new (unlit and empty) skyscrapers (condos!) which meet filthy, savage sidewalks, past shady people and the smells of frying pork, the hum of endless air conditioners.
It occurs to me that that whir at night is synonymous (for me) with summer in the city. And this sound is relatively new. That enormous professional roar didn't begin (I would guess) until the seventies. What was the sound of summer in New York in the sixties or fifties?
Wheeling across forty-second street, I sense hundreds of displaced and unhappy ghosts.
_________________
At the theatre, I wait outside. I wait until someone is kind enough to open the doors. Two sets.
I buy a ticket from a machine. I take an elevator to the fifth floor.
"Toy Story Three" doesn't make me tear up. What got to me was darker.
The toys hold hands as they face certain death in a city dump incinerator.
This scene felt brutal. I guess kids and their parent's understand, they expect, that the toys will be rescued, somehow. And of course, they were. But to me, the conventions for expectations (that everything will be okay) have been quietly altered.
I thought, "well this is it for the toys, it's a terrible way to go, but you got to go sometime". Somehow I forgot that they would (of course) be rescued.
slides out of the open refrigerator, tumbles to the floor, and shatters into five or six jagged shapes.
I stop and consider the mess.
I am stuck. I can't just roll over it (on my new borrowed wheel chair)...
so I call Jackie.
"Jackie, I've had a SMALL little disaster... I broke something, can you come over?"
(I emphasize "small" to make sure she understands this episode won't be a three hour ordeal - like last week when I fell in the bathroom toilet and Jackie wandered around the building looking for someone strong enough to lift me out of it).
"Alright, I'll be right ovah."
Jackie sounds drowsy and hesitant. "Sixty Minutes" is on in the background. It's dinnertime.
As I wait for Jackie, I stare at the broken pieces, the sludge of salmon, on the dirty tile floor.
Above an oily crescent shard, near the doorway, I fixate on a dirty string (of something); a rotting remnant of spinach or kale? No. It's a gold chain with a pearl. It's Jackie's. She's been missing it for days.
"It's a sign!" Jackie says. "What does it mean, Charlie? This plate was meant to be broken. Everything happens for a reason."
But I'm not able to join in her mystical enthusiasm. I feel weak. I'm hungry. It's difficult to talk. (I'm losing my strength to talk). Jackie requires answers but all I offer are lopsided smiles and and weak nods. Jackie is carried away by her own charisma so it doesn't seem to bother her.
After Jackie exits, and after I swallow some food, I decide to go to the movies. "Toy Story 3" has rave reviews. I'll wheelchair to 42nd and Eighth for the ten o'clock showing. I buckle the safety belt and begin my sojourn.
As I wheel away from the Hudson east to Time Square, the city becomes sinister.
There's something not right about 42nd Street. It doesn't know what it's supposed to be (anymore).
I wheel past spectacular brand-new (unlit and empty) skyscrapers (condos!) which meet filthy, savage sidewalks, past shady people and the smells of frying pork, the hum of endless air conditioners.
It occurs to me that that whir at night is synonymous (for me) with summer in the city. And this sound is relatively new. That enormous professional roar didn't begin (I would guess) until the seventies. What was the sound of summer in New York in the sixties or fifties?
Wheeling across forty-second street, I sense hundreds of displaced and unhappy ghosts.
_________________
At the theatre, I wait outside. I wait until someone is kind enough to open the doors. Two sets.
I buy a ticket from a machine. I take an elevator to the fifth floor.
"Toy Story Three" doesn't make me tear up. What got to me was darker.
The toys hold hands as they face certain death in a city dump incinerator.
This scene felt brutal. I guess kids and their parent's understand, they expect, that the toys will be rescued, somehow. And of course, they were. But to me, the conventions for expectations (that everything will be okay) have been quietly altered.
I thought, "well this is it for the toys, it's a terrible way to go, but you got to go sometime". Somehow I forgot that they would (of course) be rescued.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
PEPPER
Jackie is at the sink doing dishes.
I'm fully naked on my new wheelchair (recently borrowed from the local ALS chapter) - a red throw pillow on my lap. The borrowed wheelchair has a joystick on it's left arm. This reactive devise allows me to race forward and backwards on the bare parquet floors without intention. I am an unfocused boy.
By holding the joystick down to a hard left, I spin elegant and mindless three hundred and sixty degrees.
Jackie is saying,
"I think I upset Pepper." Jackie is working her extreme anguish expressions. "I told Pepper that my daughter didn't want to be alone with Eddie (Jackie's brother, Pepper's husband) because she's afraid that Eddie will get violent. See Charlie, we know this other man that has Alzheimer's, just like Eddie's, and this other man with Alzheimer's, woke up one morning - this is RECENT Charlie, this other other man woke up one morning and said, 'Who are you?' and beat his wife, Charlie! So now my daughter is afraid to be alone with my brother - because of the Alzheimer's!" And when Jackie says this last phrase, she slows it down and pitches it up, like a polished Dramatic Soprano finishing off a tragic aria.
I spin in my electric chair. I go back and forth on the banal parquet floor. Jackie entertains me. Don't get me wrong, I respect Jackie, but she can often soothe as a TV would, only this TV allows for a dialectic.
"What did she say Jackie, when you told her that?"
"Charlie" she whipers, " I don't think she liked it, because she got real quiet and said she had to get off the phone, and Pepper's not like that, Charlie. And now I feel tear- rib - bull."
I stop my puerile maneuvering and consider Jackie's situation. Jackie focuses on the dishes.
After a six count I say, " Jackie, you need to be generous, and kind, and patient, and very, very brave."
"Charlie, I am kind. I go over there. I sit in that studio apartment on Barrow they've lived in for the past forty years. I go and sometimes Pepper goes out for food. But Charlie it's scary! He jumps back and forth from the present to past. And what if he starts in on me? What if he starts lecturing for my youth. I was different forty years, Charlie, but Eddie forgets that."
"Let him say what he wants Jackie, he can't get to you. You're clearly not that person anymore."
"But why must the past always be drudged up? Why can't I get away from my past? I know I did some bad things, but why must I always be forced to look at it. What is G-d doing? What is G-d up to? I just don't know Charlie, but I can't take it."
Jackie (once again) channels Blanche Dubois. She's in pain, but her love for "Street Car" is coloring her delivery.
"Jackie, if you feel bad about Pepper, call her up. Tell her how much you love and appreciate her taking care of your brother. Tell her how lucky you are to have such a good sister in law."
Jackie takes my counsel like I'm the Dalai Lama or Doctor Phil, all wide eyed and still.
(I feel like a faker - I can dish it out but I can't take it).
_______________
Jackie and I scoot around my apartment making plans for it's new no-nonsense design. I show her pictures on the web of the the ten foot long desk I'll buy. Jackie is big on not owning a thing. She recommends I get rid of the scooter, "you have a wheel chair, do you need both?" and my homely breathing machine, "do you ever use that thing? Get rid of it, you don't need it."
But in the midst of our happy planning, Jackie stops short.
"I gotta go Charlie, I gotta call Pepper."
I'm fully naked on my new wheelchair (recently borrowed from the local ALS chapter) - a red throw pillow on my lap. The borrowed wheelchair has a joystick on it's left arm. This reactive devise allows me to race forward and backwards on the bare parquet floors without intention. I am an unfocused boy.
By holding the joystick down to a hard left, I spin elegant and mindless three hundred and sixty degrees.
Jackie is saying,
"I think I upset Pepper." Jackie is working her extreme anguish expressions. "I told Pepper that my daughter didn't want to be alone with Eddie (Jackie's brother, Pepper's husband) because she's afraid that Eddie will get violent. See Charlie, we know this other man that has Alzheimer's, just like Eddie's, and this other man with Alzheimer's, woke up one morning - this is RECENT Charlie, this other other man woke up one morning and said, 'Who are you?' and beat his wife, Charlie! So now my daughter is afraid to be alone with my brother - because of the Alzheimer's!" And when Jackie says this last phrase, she slows it down and pitches it up, like a polished Dramatic Soprano finishing off a tragic aria.
I spin in my electric chair. I go back and forth on the banal parquet floor. Jackie entertains me. Don't get me wrong, I respect Jackie, but she can often soothe as a TV would, only this TV allows for a dialectic.
"What did she say Jackie, when you told her that?"
"Charlie" she whipers, " I don't think she liked it, because she got real quiet and said she had to get off the phone, and Pepper's not like that, Charlie. And now I feel tear- rib - bull."
I stop my puerile maneuvering and consider Jackie's situation. Jackie focuses on the dishes.
After a six count I say, " Jackie, you need to be generous, and kind, and patient, and very, very brave."
"Charlie, I am kind. I go over there. I sit in that studio apartment on Barrow they've lived in for the past forty years. I go and sometimes Pepper goes out for food. But Charlie it's scary! He jumps back and forth from the present to past. And what if he starts in on me? What if he starts lecturing for my youth. I was different forty years, Charlie, but Eddie forgets that."
"Let him say what he wants Jackie, he can't get to you. You're clearly not that person anymore."
"But why must the past always be drudged up? Why can't I get away from my past? I know I did some bad things, but why must I always be forced to look at it. What is G-d doing? What is G-d up to? I just don't know Charlie, but I can't take it."
Jackie (once again) channels Blanche Dubois. She's in pain, but her love for "Street Car" is coloring her delivery.
"Jackie, if you feel bad about Pepper, call her up. Tell her how much you love and appreciate her taking care of your brother. Tell her how lucky you are to have such a good sister in law."
Jackie takes my counsel like I'm the Dalai Lama or Doctor Phil, all wide eyed and still.
(I feel like a faker - I can dish it out but I can't take it).
_______________
Jackie and I scoot around my apartment making plans for it's new no-nonsense design. I show her pictures on the web of the the ten foot long desk I'll buy. Jackie is big on not owning a thing. She recommends I get rid of the scooter, "you have a wheel chair, do you need both?" and my homely breathing machine, "do you ever use that thing? Get rid of it, you don't need it."
But in the midst of our happy planning, Jackie stops short.
"I gotta go Charlie, I gotta call Pepper."
Friday, July 9, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
TUMBLING ACT
I spend the first part of the last Saturday in June in contained, drowsy, air conditioning.
Jackie comes over to do dishes, rhapsodizing about the movie actor and fifties heartthrob, Tab Hunter. She has his autobiography from the New York Public Library in hand.
"Charlie! Look at these pictures! Such beautiful pictures! I've never seen such beautiful pictures."
She finds me in my bedroom, on my rolling office chair, doing... nothing.
Whenever Jackie comes over, I am pleasantly bowled over. Today, she's crazy about Tab Hunter - as moony as she was fifty years ago. And her passion is contagious. I can't help but get excited about Tab Hunter too.
"Find my glasses Jackie! I can't really see the pictures!"
"Your glasses, your glasses - are they in the bathroom? Are they in the kitchen?" She's urgent. This is important.
(This is why Jackie likes me- why others in the past have liked me. I'm often suggestible to other's hobbies, passions, fetishes. Unless I immediately shun their influence, I'm taken in. So today I spend an hour in bed, my legs in the air creating a 45 degree angle to the headboard, researching Tab Hunter, ogling shots of Tab and Natatlie, Tab and Anthony.
_____________
Earlier in the day, before breakfast, before coffee, (but after dreaming of being lost in a beach community hungover- I spent the entire dream trying to get home but I couldn't think because I was too hungover), after that - I fell off the toilet. Not completely off, but precarious enough to get my adrenaline going- enough to make me say to myself, to mouth the words silently, "stay calm, just stay really calm".
__________________________
Later in the day, I scootered to the 39th Street Flea Market. This has become a Saturday habit. I mostly peruse, but today I surprise myself and buy an "occasional table". I know it's an occasional table because the table has a provenance. Someone has written "occasional table, 1920s, Great Neck, NewYork, restored 1989, Glastonbury CT" in black ink on the underside. The occasional table is white wrought iron base with eight ceramic tiles on top. Some of the ceramic tiles have birds on them.
I had to have the table. The table will reassure me that I am the kind of a person who would own a table like this. When I get it home, I casually glance at the table, trying to imagine that I'd always owned the table. I picture people coming over and congratulating on my precious good taste. I picture them cursing themselves for not making it to the 39th Street flea market before I did.
_________________
I read David Foster Wallace's novel in the park outside my building. I feel I must, because Wallace is my exact age and David Eggers wrote that he thought it was one the best novels of the past fifty years.
But Wallace killed himself last year so I'm reluctant to read it - but I'm enjoying it - so I WILL continue to read it... and after reading for an hour, I come home and have a glass of wine.
I made dinner and as I make dinner I fall off the backless kitchen stool.
I lie on the floor and mouth the words, "just stay calm, just stay really really calm."
I call building security from a land line in the kitchen - I tug the phone to the floor - clatter.
Ten minutes later, two men in uniform quietly unlock my apartment door, find me on the kitchen floor and lift me up to standing.
One of the security men wears cologne.
I smile as they pick me up off the floor, like they're performing an amusing trick, like we're part of a tumbling act.
Jackie comes over to do dishes, rhapsodizing about the movie actor and fifties heartthrob, Tab Hunter. She has his autobiography from the New York Public Library in hand.
"Charlie! Look at these pictures! Such beautiful pictures! I've never seen such beautiful pictures."
She finds me in my bedroom, on my rolling office chair, doing... nothing.
Whenever Jackie comes over, I am pleasantly bowled over. Today, she's crazy about Tab Hunter - as moony as she was fifty years ago. And her passion is contagious. I can't help but get excited about Tab Hunter too.
She opens the cellophaned book to the middle section where there are many pages of black and white Hollywood snapshots of Tab Hunter with various starlets.
"Find my glasses Jackie! I can't really see the pictures!"
"Your glasses, your glasses - are they in the bathroom? Are they in the kitchen?" She's urgent. This is important.
(This is why Jackie likes me- why others in the past have liked me. I'm often suggestible to other's hobbies, passions, fetishes. Unless I immediately shun their influence, I'm taken in. So today I spend an hour in bed, my legs in the air creating a 45 degree angle to the headboard, researching Tab Hunter, ogling shots of Tab and Natatlie, Tab and Anthony.
_____________
Earlier in the day, before breakfast, before coffee, (but after dreaming of being lost in a beach community hungover- I spent the entire dream trying to get home but I couldn't think because I was too hungover), after that - I fell off the toilet. Not completely off, but precarious enough to get my adrenaline going- enough to make me say to myself, to mouth the words silently, "stay calm, just stay really calm".
__________________________
Later in the day, I scootered to the 39th Street Flea Market. This has become a Saturday habit. I mostly peruse, but today I surprise myself and buy an "occasional table". I know it's an occasional table because the table has a provenance. Someone has written "occasional table, 1920s, Great Neck, NewYork, restored 1989, Glastonbury CT" in black ink on the underside. The occasional table is white wrought iron base with eight ceramic tiles on top. Some of the ceramic tiles have birds on them.
I had to have the table. The table will reassure me that I am the kind of a person who would own a table like this. When I get it home, I casually glance at the table, trying to imagine that I'd always owned the table. I picture people coming over and congratulating on my precious good taste. I picture them cursing themselves for not making it to the 39th Street flea market before I did.
_________________
I read David Foster Wallace's novel in the park outside my building. I feel I must, because Wallace is my exact age and David Eggers wrote that he thought it was one the best novels of the past fifty years.
But Wallace killed himself last year so I'm reluctant to read it - but I'm enjoying it - so I WILL continue to read it... and after reading for an hour, I come home and have a glass of wine.
I made dinner and as I make dinner I fall off the backless kitchen stool.
I lie on the floor and mouth the words, "just stay calm, just stay really really calm."
I call building security from a land line in the kitchen - I tug the phone to the floor - clatter.
Ten minutes later, two men in uniform quietly unlock my apartment door, find me on the kitchen floor and lift me up to standing.
One of the security men wears cologne.
I smile as they pick me up off the floor, like they're performing an amusing trick, like we're part of a tumbling act.
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