December 25, 2004
When oh when am I going to stop waking up without “la trouille.” This, in French, basically means a pit in your stomach. The only good part of it is that I no longer associate drinking or drugging with part of the range of options that would fall under the category of “solution” to this problem. The bad part is that all my nouveau awareness and spiritual connectedness does not mean I am suddenly not still a very anxious person much of the time.
My trip started inauspiciously when the framed collage I was bringing to my sister slipped onto its face in Union Station. I thought I’d have a heart attack, but a sweet apple-pie mom from Oklahoma traveling with her husband and three kids said she didn’t hear a “crack.” She then told me she was dying of curiosity to see what it was, and so I took off the wrapping and unveiled it. Before I could even explain, I heard the hoped-for oohs and aahs. I told her these were stamps on mail I had received during a year when I had little access to phone or to email. I sort of wish I’d told the truth, but there I was in Union Station, with all these men in uniforms patrolling on segueways, and every word I said could be heard in the immediate area due to the particular acoustics of the place. So I told her I'd been in El Salvador. No matter, one of her kids still remarked the piece was “so cool!” and the Mom said “I wish I was your sister.” (I had specified this was a gift of gratitude to my sister in particular for having gone “above and beyond all calls of duty” in supporting me during a difficult year.)
The trip itself was truly deluxe. The cool part about Amtrak was the dining car (meals included with a sleeper, thank you very much) in which you are seated next to strangers and from which one can expect some unexpected conversation. All the cliches are true about the ability to open yourself up to a stranger when traveling. I met a couple named Lucy and Eric, she a younger, bit prettier version of Julie Hagerty (circa Airplane!), he a Dutch Dave Mathews lookalike. Both, sharp, smart and funny and I decided not to be as discreet as I was with the Union Stationite family. Lucy and Eric were suitably intrigued by more story, in a worldly way. Could it be that Martha Stewart has made prison stays ho-hum? I can just hear my 2005 references to my experiences being referred to as “so last year!” (By the way, if anyone reading this knows how to get in touch with Martha’s “people,” don’t you think I’d be the perfect “as-told-to go-to guy” when she’s shopping for a ghostwriter to document her version of “Living…Inside”?)
Inevitably I had the wonderful experience of falling asleep to the clickey-clack of the swaying train, but not before giggling at thoughts like track lighting for deserts, and wondering why there aren’t more “flashers” who get their kicks exposing themselves briefly either to or from trains that zip by in the night. (At Stony Brook, where I went to college for a year pre-NYU, I once lost one of those Truth-or-Dare type games. I was required to plaster myself naked against the window in the dark late at night, this during a blizzard. When someone walked by, we would flash the lights on and off, and the person would do a double-take, wondering if she had seen what she’d indeed seen).
Upon my arrival, my sister and niece and I drove around Albuquerque a bit getting me acclimated. Of course I asked myself, can I really live here, be happy here? Do I have any choice? I could, of course, use my sister’s help, but I could also get a job back in L.A., which has become a whole new city for me within the context of sobriety. My sister seems inordinately stressed out about money, and I feel all my expenditures are under the microscope. I wonder if that’s why her reaction to the collage, which I thought would evoke an emotional or aesthetic response on par with that of Andrea’s at least, was so noticeably anti-climactic.
I find myself reading David Sedaris’ latest work, some of which details what a delicate place it is to write about your family when they may not want to be written about and you may prefer they don't read you either. Even more dicey is the realization that it is often easier for you to be completely honest with a stranger than it is with a friend or relation.
Sometimes communication is easier at an epistolary distance, once removed from all those sensations of worry about the world and one’s place in it that are constantly sloshing over the side of one’s cup runnething over. (Stick that one in your GrammarCheck!) Maybe coming to Albuquerque will be about giving back to my sister in ways a lot my profound that some artfully conceived stamps in a frame she probably couldn’t help thinking she paid for indirectly.
I tried to give back more directly last night by very simply accompanying her on a tour of her gated-community, where she had been strongarmed into being one of the annual judges of the annual holiday displays. This task was both an opportunity to judge the Christmas lights on the one hand and to not judge those hanging them on the other, for engaging in what is essentially an attempt to be civic-minded instead of cynical.
Why not, really? And what could be more pretty and less requiring of denominational declarations than lights? Of course there were a lot of really decent displays, but we wanted to resist the more assertively attention-getting among them in favor of the more decoratively discreet. So, announcing that I was putting the “gay” into her “gated-community,” I found the best way to help my sister continue to earn her stripes as good neighbor of the month (hey, better than “best neighborhood dealer,” wouldn’t you agree?) was to provide her with a series of categories that would fulfill her obligation without being saccharine.
Hence my categories: Personal Favorite, Best Use of Color, Honorable Mentions, and the Mosts; Most Impressive. Most Restrained, Most Elegant, Most Traditional, Most Las Vegasy Cul-de-Sac, and Most Over-the-Top-and-Luvin’-It! (also known as Most Sarcastic Reaction).
The important part was that she and I found a Christmas Eve activity that was fun. And, while hardly along the lines of Oprah’s Angel Network funding schools for ex-child prostitutes in South Africa, neither was it devoid of social usefulness (the tour bus of seniors in front of us part of the way seemed to be having a lovely time). And we laughed a lot and I didn’t need to get drunk or high to have a good time.
I can’t speak for the seniors or claim any knowledge as to what may or may have not been in their hot cider.
MCO 2004
