“I think it is fair to say that the West has lost its place in the national imagination because, by some sad evolution, the idea of human nature has become the opposite of what it was when the myth of the West began, and now people who are less shaped and constrained by society are assumed to be disabled and dangerous. this is bad news for the American psyche, a fearful and antidemocratic idea, which threatens to close down change. I think it would be a positively good thing for the West to assert itself in the most interesting of terms, so that the whole country must hear and be reanimated by dreams and passions it has too casually put aside and too readily forgotten.”
- Marilynne Robinson
My parents’ generation moved to the West Coast, if they weren’t already there, from places like Chicago, Nebraska, Long Island, so they could do things like get married barefoot or in a garage and no one would think anything of it. So it would follow that people move to the East Coast from places like Portland, Washington, the Bay Area, so they can have a cocktail hour and a bridal brunch. But, no. It’s not parallel. Isn’t that funny?
"If our lives are gifts to begin with… in some sense they are not ‘ours’ even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded. As we mature, and particularly as we come into the isolation of ‘being on our own,’ we begin to feel the desire to give ourselves away—in love, in marriage, to our work, to the gods, to politics, to our children. And adolescence is marked by that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?"
When I was hired by Mary and Alice Moore, they gave me a lot warnings. They warned of their bickering, of the shop’s propensity to accumulate soot and dust; the freezing temperatures, the demanding customers, the tedious backroom tasks, the occasional invasion of mice and groundhogs; that I’d have to eat lunch standing up, that I’d have to wear sensible shoes, and finally, that I might receive phone calls from dirty old men looking for a massage parlor. Mother and daughter, both tall, strikingly lovely women, stood telling me this in the midst of their delightfully opulent near-fairy tale gift shop, its shelves and hearth brimming with silk scarves, cashmere gloves, silver neck chains, French perfumes, silkscreened pottery, beeswax candles, salted caramels, twinlking lights, and a rack of rainbow-colored ribbons and wrapping paper: Simple Pleasures.
“Alice has never liked the name,” Mary said. “And there’s a smut shop in Central Falls with the same one.”
And sure enough, within my first couple of weeks we got a call asking about the “four hand special.” After that, a heavy breather: “How much is a half hour?” Just after Christmas someone called to ask if we’d be open on New Years, and when we said no, he asked if we had “three girls who want to work anyway.” We always follow these questions with a pause, thinking, for a moment, that we might have the answer. And then it clicks. “Are you trying to get a hold of Simple Pleasures, the spa?” At which point said caller usually hangs up.
When the Moores interviewed me, I was still working at the RISD store. I applied for that job the day before Hurricane Irene hit. In every way I could think to, I presented myself as the ideal candidate to sell Color-Aid, Gatorade, and commemorative school mugs to the incoming students and eager parents who’d soon be knocking down the school doors. That night, the city cleaned Walgreens and CVS of votives and bottled water, taped their windows shut, filled their bathtubs, and watched the storm knock down a couple powerlines and uproot a tree. Then I was hired and quickly delegated to the job of folding two thousand RISD logo t-shirts for minimum wage, forty hours a week. I’d stand in the humid, narrow galley-shelving in the cellar, color-coding apparel in absolute, suffocating silence. Then I’d eat my lunch out back over the canal. The old illustration buildings crowded together along the brick walkway like a New England postcard. A few ducks swam by. Some students drafted at a picnic table. Then I’d go back in and stock all manner of candy, gum erasers, gag gifts, interiors magazines, Chapstick, umbrellas, sweatshirts, and sports team paraphernalia — the RISD Balls and Nads, respectively. I became addicted to Lintdor balls. I’d buy several at the register and keep them in my apron pocket to be savored through the day like painkillers. Surveillance cameras hung from all corners, including the basement, and we were not allowed to be still. Employees couldn’t chat. The part of the store I worked in was often dead for long periods, but I had to keep moving. So I’d fiddle around with merchandise, knock t-shirts from the shelf so I could refold them, talk to myself. Someone’s mother died, someone else got sick, two long-time employees quit, the soundsystem stopped working, and the fluorescent lights buzzed louder and louder. The students came in droves and we’d ring up hundreds of dollars worth of supplies and watch the horrible heavy shadow cross their faces when we announced the total. Occupy Providence formed the week I realized that my paltry paycheck — and most people’s in America — was being taxed the same percentage as a CEO at Bain.
One day I came across a book on the shelves called Providence Sketchbook, and I kept a copy behind the counter with me so I could sneak peeks at it when I felt like no one was watching. Life hinged on these little thrills! The book was full of beautiful watercolor drawings of historical buildings throughout the city. One drawing I liked in particular was of an old blacksmith forge, supposedly on Waterman St., though I’d never seen it. After six weeks, I felt thoroughly lousy. Walking home along the canal and under the mall and over the foundry, my mind was set on Yell mode. Walking there and back, all I heard was yelling: WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE. WHY DO I FEEL TRAPPED. Don’t get me wrong; everyone at the store was perfectly nice. But. But what? I was exhausted, and had a spike of dread in both heels, and this expanse of joyless days, no one’s fault but my own. I was scared. This wasn’t what I’d planned on. I responded to a job listing for a tarot reader in Attleboro, Mass, and on a day off I took the commuter train to meet the proprietress. That’s another story. It was a warm, fall day, and while I was sitting on the Attleboro Outbound platform going home, two things happened: an ACELA went by, and Mary Moore from Simple Pleasures called me. I’d never seen those high-speed trains in person before. I held my hand over the receiver. The sheer velocity of the thing was mind-boggling, barreling by like a mythical beast, the force of it felt deep in my chest. The sun was warm on my back, and in just a moment the train virtually vanished down the track. It was sort of amazing. My heart was pounding. And then silence. “Sorry,” I said to Mary. “A train just went by.”
“OK…,” she said, wary, “You responded to our Craigslist ad a couple of months ago. We liked your email. But it’s taken a while to organize. Are you still looking for a job? Would you like to come and meet us?”
The following week, I hopped on a bus and navigated to Richmond Square, though the driver had no idea where it was. How could a city this small still hold so many secret places? I found myself standing at the banks of the Seekonk River, in a giant lot abutting Blackstone Park. And there was the little 19th Century blacksmith forge from the Providence Sketchbook. A fenced-in garden patio was open off to the side, and a flock of plump sparrows and morning birds flitted about the stone pots and benches. This was the shop. The door was open, and there were the Moores tucked inside.
I switched my loafers for the pumps stowed in my bag, and introduced myself to Mary. When I briefed her on why I was in Providence to begin with (recently graduated, living out Sweeney’s last year at Brown), and where I’d been working, she said, “That must be hard to be around, especially having just left a period of life that was so communal.”
She hit the nail on the head.
So I quit RISD and worked for the Moores, who welcomed me and paid me well and fed me delicious sandwiches and candies (standing up) and taught me about specialty fibers and jewelry and to properly wrap a gift, and who shared inside jokes and doubts and the great, humorous labors of running a small business for twenty years — and many other things, too. And now I think: O ye of little faith! I guess that’s why I’m telling this story. It was still a while before I felt OK. But that shop is where I convalesced. And though I’ve actually had other jobs since, a wide variety, and other trials that have nothing to do with earning money, Simple Pleasures is still emblematic to me of God’s wild, funny, and gradual way of helping find an Exit sign during a fire.
Providence’s geography is made of optical illusions. As the crow flies, it’s a small city, but the hills, highways, waterways, and 17th Century steeples create these seemingly immense distances. And because there are only a few tall structures, which are spaced few and far between, the vista is skewed. When I’m coming upon the statehouse, which sits atop a steep incline above the train station, my house appears to be miles away — though it’s only two blocks farther. Cobble streets and potholed alleys wind in and around Brown and RISD, a layout carved by horse three hundred years ago, yet I-95 seems to roar by every which way you look. Somewhere in this is a metaphor both for my life thus lived here, and for early adulthood. But I’ve tried to pin this on Providence a few times already.
After the man called Simple Pleasures asking for three working girls on New Years, Mary called the chief of police in Central Falls. “I don’t think that spa is really a spa, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, Simple Pleasures? Sure,” he said. “Everything that you think is happening there is,” he said. “And it’s perfectly legal, what they’re doing. So I don’t really know what to tell you.” He paused. “The next time one of them calls, have some fun with it — tell them to show up wearing women’s underwear or something.”
“It was one thing to have rich people in your pasture, but when the Clatterbucks thought of Catholics, they saw statues of the Virgin Mary going up in the yard, ten feet high.”
- Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars
There are a lot of things to do in New York City, but if you live there — in the way anyone lives any where — for the most part, you’re going to do the same five or six things over and over again. The Lafayette Bistro on Franklin had the best ten-dollar plate of jerk chicken, sauteed spinach and garlic potatoes in town. Otherwise, the default was deviled eggs and Guinness at Maggie Brown’s, a blue cheese burger and chipotle mayo, or a spinach salad with lots of roasted beets, butter beans and lemon (which has since been removed from the menu). If we were on the run, we’d go next door to Five Spot for chicken po’boys and black eyed peas. At Chez Lolas, all-you-can-eat mussels for twelve-dollars on Tuesdays, a pile of warm Italian bread. The Alibi, Sweet Revenge, Thursday happy-hour at Rope (though Robert claims the draft beer was only that cheap because it’d gone flat). That’s about it. All in the neighborhood, and all within walking distance. And in the short time I’ve been gone even some of those had changed. The Tejada Grocery, where Pedro used to strike Lotto three times a year, has been turned into a fine dining restaurant with low-lighting and a posh tin ceiling, candles on the table, a place I probably never would have had the wherewithal to eat at, but where I might in my future as a New York tourist.
Is that true? Will I become a tourist? I have had, over the years, a tremendous amount of bad food in New York City. There’s the diner eggs burned brown and flat, crappy pizza, watery soup with dehydrated carrots, old bodega milk. Even the nice cafes are like — really? Two dry bread wedges with a piece of old brie and sliced apple? A flick of arugula? Cooked coffee? A fast-food Chinese restaurant on every block, fit with halogen lights, a pair of knifed chairs, a drain (for what?) in the middle of the floor. But MAN, it’s always the worst of it that tastes best! Grabbing a slice on your way home from work, or an old bagel, or a hot dog slathered in sauerkraut and mustard, a greasy clump of lo mein, I mean these are are about as basic-bad as you get — but there’s nothing like it! You’re more tired, bedraggled, wound-up, humiliated, and abused by a city than you’ve ever been before, and then, magic! A moment of ecstasy, a pause, a New York relief second only to a fifteen minute cab ride home after a night of heavy drinking. Oh, yes, yes, I love it here, you think, right as some odious substance drips from the subway ceiling into your food; right as the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen walks by without even a glance; right as the craziest man you’ve ever seen nearly shoves you into the tracks. There’s no way this food would be satisfying anywhere else. It would be horrifying, disappointing at least. It’s a lot like how everything tastes amazing when you’re camping.
My father took us on a two-week camping trip when I was a kid, and he made Dinty Moore beef stew one night, and I thought it was the absolute best thing I’d ever had in my life. I was sopping it up with brown bread, raving about it. So, as a little joke, he brought a can home for dinner several months later, and served it to me. The greasy, tepid chunks of potato swirled around in my bowl. I spooned some into my mouth and frowned. Needless to say, I was pretty jaded about the whole thing.
Last weekend I went down to the city for a friend’s birthday party. It was snowing when I left Providence. I had to skid down hills to the bus station, and it was all white, everywhere. I took the passage around the canal and under the bridge, where various panels depict that river’s shrinkage over time. I read The Patron Saint of Liars the whole way down, and liked it very much. In New York, the snow looked more like a septic tank had emptied onto the sidewalks. But I was happy to be there against its flat, white sky. Good friends, weak drinks, elbow-to-elbow, a jukebox at some point later. Robert danced with me to “Waterloo Sunset,” albeit being let down because it wasn’t Abba. The next morning in Sunset Park’s Chinatown, I had the cheapest, freshest plate of squid, cauliflower, pork and chives you could ever dream of — in the coldest, starkest cafeteria you could imagine — under the most demented Chinese TV game show in history. BK 4 lyfe.
Out on the main drag, the Verazanno Bridge was stilled under fog in the distance. The sidewalks were crowded with families haggling over live crabs and toads at the open-air markets on every corner. I wondered where I should be, if my life would be any more sensical in this town I’d invested so much in. I don’t know. How do you know? I don’t think so. I wanted to be in Providence with Sweeney most of last year. Since leaving school, I’ve had five jobs. I’ve worked as an editorial assistant, a clerk at the RISD art store, a tarot reader at a metaphysical shop, a lackey at a high-end gift boutique and an assistant at an interior design firm. And what’s the next step? I guess that’s the wrong question. Be fruitful and productive at whatever’s in front of you. Take care of people, and be kind. I’m a writer, anyway. My friend Yanara said to keep my writerly goggles on at all times, perceiving every situation at all my service jobs as an extension of some story I’m working on. I think this is true.
That evening in Bed-Stuy, Amber and I ate mashed plantains, black beans and hand-cut tortilla chips on her coffee table over small glasses of whiskey, swiping at bits of cat hair and ash, debating things like, oh, whether morals can exist without theology. Then we watched a hysterical episode of Parks and Recreation. I slept on her sinking EZ-chair, my bottom-half on the seat and my head on the ottoman, needing nothing but a fleece throw because New York apartments are just always so warm.
Wilder Quarterly, a gorgeous contemporary gardening & lifestyle magazine, will be “hitting the stands” before the end of the month! I had the privilege of serving as Assistant Editor once again this winter, and as it sold out within just a few weeks last fall, I encourage interested readers to pre-order soon (Click on da link)! Below is a tasting of what to expect:
“…coast down to Mexico to check out Xochemilco’s floating garden district with Maureen Gilmer. Renaissance rooftop gardener and Atlantic writer, Annie Novak, shows us how field-to-fork stays alive in the colder months and Portland chef Aaron Woo tell us how he is revolutionizing the vegetarian plate. We wander through the garden with Beginners director Mike Mills, and take a tour of Austin-based musician, Martin Perna’s gardens. Before heading inside for the season, we check in with famed horticulturist Yvonne Savio in Los Angeles.
Plus, we’ve got the Wilder regional hort tips, winter-ready recipes, instructions on creating your own string garden and canning your own goods, too.”
“…it seemed to exist only to maintain itself. It didn’t seem to have any relationship to people who hung around gas stations.”
- Joan Didion on the 1988 presidential primaries from a CSPAN2 interview in 2000
When my college roommate ensconced with NBC to prepare for the primary, she sent me this text: “Made it to New Hampshire. It’s charming in that my room overlooks the R.G. Sullivan 7-20-4 Cigar Factory.” Late last Sunday night, I resolved to pay her a visit, share four-dollar margaritas, pajamas, and a king-sized bed in the hotel room where, eight floors below, iconic TV personalities paced around the network floor in theater make-up. So I caught an early commuter train to Boston, and a charter bus to Manchester, where I stepped off only to see freezing blank stretches of local highway and a few campaign signs stuck hither and thither in its meridians, some of them knocked over.
I don’t have the working knowledge to provide anything like a political commentary, but I do have impressions, for whatever its worth.
Lina was busy making calls and keeping the headquarters’ coffee hot, so when the R.G. Sullivan was in sight, I kept walking. Stretching beyond the old grounds was the “mile of mills,” accompanied by crops of brick row houses with identical brick smokestacks, built in an incline up the hill. Each block of old workers’ residences had their backs to the others, creating a wide alley of dirty patios, feral cats, parking spots. Kimberley B. Marlow wrote about this area for the Seattle Times, saying, “…the windows [that were] cut in the 1870s to let in every available drop of sunlight on a wintry day still tell the tale of mill barons who begrudged every penny’s worth of lamp oil.” One had a For Rent sign on the door, a single room flat for $875, which pretty much crushed any working class visions of yore.
Rounding the last house, I came upon Elm Street, downtown’s main drag. A skinny, bowlegged man toddered out of a TD Bank, behind which sat the Radisson Hotel where all the major coverage was happening. He did not seem to notice. There was ABC, FOX, whomever, sprawled across parking lots in things that looked like weather balloons, full of cameras, tiny screens, mops and drones. Across the street was a demonstration for Occupy New Hampshire Primary, where, among other things, someone dressed as a heifer handed out flyers for the cattle workers union.
As I neared, I noticed RON PAUL FOR PEACE written in green and pink chalk all over the sidewalk. I circled the demonstration — people who looked like people I grew up with, huddled around pamphlets and park benches — and phoned a good friend in New York who explained that Occupy had recently made a big push for Ron Paul, a turn of events I’d been oblivious to, and which struck me like a strange and disturbing next chapter.
But no one else on Elm Street seemed to be connected to this otherwise monolithic event. And yet there was Mitt Romney’s headquarters, in a squat storefront across the street from Ben & Jerry’s. People were going to work, eating lunch, buying birthday cards. The avenues were old and wide, and the businesses were odd — a Rent-A-Center next to a fine dining restaurant, for instance. NBC lackeys wearing press badges, talking to their boyfriends on the phone. A side street full of reproduced Ye Olde Shoppes, abutted by a mid-century opera house, an historic park, a veterans memorial, a funny Mexican cantina, a diner. It wasn’t until I walked into Castro’s Fine Cigars that I found the first real evidence of regular people talking about the primaries.
The shop was full of the usual sweet heavy stench, brown carpeting, and yellow lighting. Four men sat smoking in barber chairs around a television, heckling the broadcast. New England cigar shops are always filled with men smoking cigars. One had a length of a bull dog’s leash wrapped around his fingers. I bought a pack of cigarettes, and sat down on a leather couch and listened to them.
Perry chooses to skip New Hampshire, hightailing it to the Palmetto State. “Good riddance.” New Hampshire has traditionally been a red state. “And we’ve gotta keep it that way!” Recent criticisms flare about Mitt Romney’s capitalizing on bankrupt businesses when he was at Bain, resulting in major job loss. “I still got my job!”
“Romney cut jobs?”
“Yeah, he cut jobs,” another guy replied. “So what? Sometimes you gotta cut jobs!”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know he cut jobs.”
“All I know’s, anything to get dat fucked administration outta the White House,” the man with the dog said. “The whole administration — Pelosi and everyone! They’re ruining the country!” He apologized to me on my way out. “Sorry, sweethea’t. It’s political!”
You hear it all the time. They’re ruining the country. Who is, and how, and when did it start? Do we pay too much money, or not enough? It seems more like Bank of America is ruining the country. Or stock speculations. Or the fact the the Capital Gains tax is as low as my income tax. Which is high if you’re below poverty line. So who started that? And who are these shiny-toothed guys vying for our vote now? I long to see someone sweaty and disheveled like Nixon. Mitt Romney has a jet taking him from place to place. “Did you get to see his hair?” My grandmother asked the next day. Rick Santorum has a pick-up truck and one press-aid, and some vile social policies. And if the whole thing happened only in a studio, I wouldn’t be surprised. If it was all happening in a comic book, I’d believe it even more.
So I walk to the Radisson. It’s way below freezing. And Lina meets me at the door where people are clustered eating elephant-shaped sugar cookies. She says something funny, and I’m so happy to see her, like a family member. She’s been paging for NBC since we graduated last spring. And I put on a lanyard and walk into the news floor where Lawrence O’Donnell is powdery, and everyone’s set up at computers, and various call-in interviews are happening on mini backdrops over the room. Lina tells me that when she first arrived, before the giant hall was adorned, she walked in on a couple of the main crew members dancing to Buena Vista Social Club full blast.
Upstairs in her hotel room, I can see the old cigar factory, just like she promised. I turn on the TV and watch the NBC shows they’re filming downstairs. I turn it off and write for a long time and watch the sunset over a city that looks as ancient as England, except for the Interstate. I go downstairs for a cigarette and share the freezing bench with a camera guy who just finished filming “Hardball.” He’s admittedly not into politics. He asks why I’m there, and I have to explain myself a couple of times. At some point he tells me of the guy who got him his first camera gig when all at once a tattered Ron Paul mobile drives by with Occupy demonstrators bellowing out its windows.
“That’s weird, right?” I said.
I walk around the old cigar factory and realized it’s now business suites, populated by three mortgage companies. I go back to the hotel, finish some work, and turn the TV back on right as Lina clocks out, collapsing onto the giant bed. It was the Ed Show. He was interviewing incredlous Democrats at Millie’s Tavern on Elm Street. So Lina and I walk and talk for a few hours. Enter: the four-dollar margaritas, a full moon, a woman crying for real or pretend outside the restaurant window, all our trials and tribulations of the fall and winter, our favorite scenes from Freaks and Geeks, enduring affection and disputed memories. We wonder why anyone would be inspired to become a TV political journalist. It’s such a production. It must make them sick. And Lina says, “Well, you know, the guys who are in charge now, they were probably young NBC journalists when the Wall fell.” And she’s right. I guess that’d convince you to stuck with it. We go back to the hotel where everything’s calmed down, curl up in the king-sized bed listening to the Hair soundtrack.
I get ready to leave in the morning, in pitch darkness. The moon is still full and high. I go down to the network floor and hug Lina goodbye, who’s already gotten to work. I pass the cigar factory and think of the guys in Castro’s. I wait in a nearly empty bus station listening to morning talk radio about the town halls and public councils of the past twenty-four hours. When I board, a man wearing a grimy knitted scarf paces the aisle asking if any of us are registered New Hampshire voters, and then explains that he’s running third party and begins handing out flyers. The sun is rising as we pull away from the station.
My essay, “Our Bodies, Our Smoke,” is now available in Owl Eye Review, a hearty, Houston-based publication of poetry and nonfiction.
Also, once again, please direct your attention to 7STOPS Magazine for my French-failure story “The Strawberry Cake,” as well as new and exciting work by Ben Korman (“Nature Does Not Knock), Lindsay MaHarry (“Difficult Country”), Katie Oldaker (“Liquor Stories”) and Chanelle Bergeron (“Backyard Botanicals”).
Finally, The Corresponding Society chapbook imprint, ! How Now !, will be releasing three titles in just one week: “Escape Mushroom Style” by Trinie Dalton; “The Sea In Me / The Riddle We Heard” by Popahna Brandes; and Litttle Breather by Chanelle Bergeron. More information coming soon. Stay tuned for NYC and PVD reading dates!
