4.6 Alexander Visits Texas

1.

Once I was staying at a motel somewhere in Texas (even then I didn’t know the town’s name) and I woke up with a man standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that the police might be coming but I didn’t need to worry about it. When the police come I should just be cool. Scant specifics were provided, and I was too exhausted and grumpy to ask for clarification. After a short vague panic I resigned myself to whatever fate I would meet and put a pillow over my head so he wouldn’t bother me anymore. That was years ago.

2. 

My phone rings and I wander into a bedroom. Maria-Elisa seems upset and isn’t making very much sense. She says the police might be there when I come back.

3.

The perpetrator is crouched on the stoop, peering through the window and shouting something like, “Give me the fucking key” when I roll up with Mithun. I get out and mosey past like I’m on my way elsewhere. When I’m out of sight of the man, Mithun pulls up next to me and rolls down the window. I look over my shoulder and saunter to the window, resting my elbows on the edge. He offers to drive around with me a bit until the coast is clear. I decline.

Maria-Elisa cracks open the side door and I slip in before she slams it shut and pulls the bolt. She shoves me into her bedroom, closing the door behind us. I’m juggling two six packs. She’s like, “Hide that shit.” I stuff one into a hamper and cover it with a sweatshirt. I push the other one behind the hamper, partially under a nightstand or cabinet.

4.

Basically out of nowhere, the woman looks me in the eye and says, “Your friend is very handsome.” She’s referring to me. She’s sitting on an armchair upholstered in a reddish tapestry depicting unicorns. I’m slouching on a loveseat across from her, wearing a teal nylon taffeta windbreaker I bought at Brooklyn Flea for $3. The appropriate response to compliments of that kind from strangers is “Thank you,” which is what I say. “He’s really handsome,” she says, still staring me in the eye. I’m like, “Gosh, thanks.” She says, “You’re really handsome. Look at you. You’re really cute.” I laugh and say, “Wow, thanks.” I don’t look at her eight-year-old. I basically don’t look at anyone.

Apparently she tried the same tack with Chris a few months back, when Maria was standing right there. For Maria, that had been the last straw.

5.

The woman wanders into another room as if lost in thought. There is a half-full beer on a table that has cartoony art (including a winking Sailor Moon) drawn on it in with magic marker. She regards the beer, picks it up, and slurps it down in three gulps, as if she were at a bar and all her friends were getting up to leave.

Her husband has stopped hollering by now, but we’re keeping the house in lock-down until the police arrive. I nurse fantasies of a sudden panic as he smashes a window.

6.

Maria-Elisa has a small pink device that looks something like a computer charger. It has a node you stick to an object, and that object becomes a resonant speaker. We got the coffee table to play KTRU. “Isn’t that cool!” she says. “You could stick it to anything!” She hands it to the kid, who is obviously charmed in an oblique, lackluster way. The entire night, this is the closest I see him to being pleased. He reminds me of a student cautiously enjoying a classroom demonstration. He tries to stick the node to a beer bottle cap, but that doesn’t work very well. Maria hands him something, possibly a lamp.

The other experiment we have is a tall hexagonal glass that Maria-Elisa fills with a mixture of milk and dish soap. The idea is that drops of food coloring will swirl, which they do. We affix the speaker to the glass and turn on some bass-heavy music, but the vibration doesn’t have a substantial effect on the green drops of food coloring, which fan out a bit and stop.

The mother has collapsed on an armchair and is swinging from defiant to maudlin and back, over and over and over. Just as the kid is about to get distracted, she starts up again. “It’s my fucking house!” she mutters. “I’m going. I’m going. It’s my fucking house! I gotta go.” She’ll lean forward and brace her hands on the chair’s arms. Then we’d have to talk her out of it. “I really just don’t think that’s a very good idea. Come on, the police should be here any minute. Hey, what if we stick it to a pot!”

7.

Maria and Chris start singing “Happy Birthday,” but neither really commits. I join in sheepishly toward the end, so ashamed I could melt. It falls completely flat. Maria saves the day by breaking into a rousing joke. “You look like a gorilla and smell like one too!” Both the kid and the mother think this is funny—the woman starts to reminisce in very vague terms.

The police finally arrive, two or so hours after the first call was placed. A lady cop asks questions and points the flashlight beam at the woman’s face. The woman is plastered and not making much sense. The cop directs questions to the child, who is standing next to his mother in the doorway. We discover that it’s not the kid’s actual birthday. His family celebrates it in January because on the date of his actual birthday his father left them. It’s also up to him to describe the dispute: the husband bullied and shoved his wife outside and pushed her into a car; she knocked her head on the bumper.

The cop tells the woman to stay in the house and lock the doors. There is no sign of the husband outside: the police will search. The woman goes out anyway, and the lady cop shouts at her to go back inside and lock the door. When the door is closed, the woman calls the cop a bitch.

Later, Maria is livid. Apparently this is a thing: when the police arrive for a domestic disturbance call and find a drunk victim, they are much less accommodating. “I told her! I told her! Why’d we let her have that goddamn beer?”

8.

The entire night is spent negotiating the line between bearing witness and exploitative voyeurism (a line you might be negotiating now, as you read this). I’m taking mental notes constantly; this might make it in the novel. I spend a couple hours practicing a low-affect, dead-eyed, non-agentive bearing.

9.

The kid goes berserk and shoves his mother into a table. She is so drunk by now as to be totally useless. He’s screaming things like, “Mama, you’re drunk,” and “Do you WANT him to hurt you?!” We’re like, “What the fuck,” but don’t intervene. He keeps pushing her, bracing himself at an angle and keeping his head low. He doesn’t mean to knock her over, just to keep her away from the door. She’s sloppy and stumbles, jostling the beer bottles and almost knocking them over, but not quite. The kid is hysterical. Maria and I walk into another room.

10.

She’s finally passed out on the sofa. The kid, who is awake, cuddles with her. We’re outside smoking and standing with our weight on one leg. A Technicolor, life-sized papier-mâché monstrosity called “Hair Fantasy” is leaning against the side stoop. It was brought home from an art installation. I had run out to meet Mark when he rolled up, intending to explain the situation to him (which I did). As we stand around by Hair Fantasy, he imitates me to comic effect: catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, then catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, maybe five times in quick succession.

11.

At long last the woman’s sister rolls up on a three-wheel bicycle. She shakes the woman awake and bullies her quite viciously before sending her home. The sister takes the kid to spend the night at her place.

Rid of them, we booze until past 3am. This has been all told a two to three hour ordeal. I fall asleep on the couch, wearing my lumberjack PJs that were a gift from a friend’s mother. It’s still dark when a knock on the door wakes me. I’m naked from the waist up, so I pull my windbreaker on and zip it up to the clavicle. The woman is standing outside and seems sober. “Is my son in there?” I gather my mental energies and say, very slowly, “He was taken by your sister last night and is staying with her.” She thanks me and walks away. I bolt the door and shed the jacket, careful not to knock against the table as I shuffle around my luggage to the sofa.

The next morning I wake up at 8 or 8:30 and can’t get back to sleep. I empty beer bottles into the sink four at a time and put the empties into a brown grocery bag for recycling. I do some of the dishes as well.

12.

That night, Maria and I are in an apartment by Rice, visiting with an old friend and some of her friends. We basically tell the whole story to three people, who are all sitting on a sofa across from us. When we are finished, one of the listeners takes a poll: what ethnicity or, like, race did they think this woman was? The way Maria and I had told it, it had been ambiguous. He points to his friend.

“I was thinking Hispanic.”

“White.”

“Okay, see, I thought she was black. So which was it?”

Maria gives a clever answer, and everybody laughs. We go play Settlers of Catan, and my team wins.

13.

The next night J_____ is over. She tells us about a composition written by a Rice professor (“like the whitest guy ever”) that she once had to perform. The first movement was called “Prayer,” or something. The second was called “Holocaust.” The last was called “Klezmer,” and at the very end all the musicians were supposed to clap their hands and say, in unison, “Opa” or some equally Eastern-European-sounding exclamation (I can’t for the life of me remember what the exact word was).

“I literally almost walked out,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “I was so pissed.”

4.3 Time Moves Forward

NATURAL DISASTERS

I was sitting in S███’s office when the shaking started, and  S███ was eating lunch in the kitchen. We discussed what it could be: not, it became clear, the neighbors walking up the stairs. A crane across the way might have been the culprit, except there is no reason for a crane to cause the building to sway (I think I made a wrecking ball joke). I looked out the window, but people on the street seemed to be walking along normally, though S███ said she spotted a man sitting on a stoop looking confused. It was all very surreal (I was under the impression that earthquakes just don’t happen in New York). Not until S███’s father sent her an “Are you okay, there was an earthquake” text did we have an answer, though if he had waited 30 more seconds I would have seen it on my work Twitter account (which was blowing up, Ke$ha-style).

The office. Luckily it was a minor earthquake, or I would have been crushed by a tub of power tools. If there was a God who loved humanity, He would have caused an earthquake strong enough to toss Tavin (bottom center) out of the window and in front of a Mack truck while sparing all other living beings.

It happens that I grew up on the Alabama coast, so I have lost the fear of God with regard to hurricanes. Irene was a bummer because they closed public transportation about 16 hours in advance of the hurricane, thus preventing me from going to the party that was one of the main reasons for my visit to New York in the first place. It happened during the night: mainly a lot of wind and rain. There was some minor flooding nearby and uprooted trees blocking roads toward the Park Slope area. It so happens that Sara’s neighborhood was not a flood risk, but even if it was, I would not have left.

ALSO, DAVE & BUSTERS IN TIMES SQUARE

Late that Thursday, S███ dragged me to the Dave & Buster’s in Times Square that is open past midnight. Dave & Buster’s is an adult-oriented arcade space that sells $10 Bud Lights. It is located a floor above the infamous Times Square Applebee’s. To annoy her I kept saying things like, “Is that the Empire State Building?” and “Is this Times Square?” in exactly the tone and volume an actual curious tourist would use. We spent all our tickets on Wonka candy. Afterward she dragged me to the Forever 21 that is open past midnight in Times Square. There were some French women there, one of whom was wearing white canvas shoes.

WHAT AM I READING RIGHT NOW?

Well, since you asked, I am on a huge Kenzaburo Oe kick. Oh man, also, have any of you read The Master and Margarita? It was so good. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good.

THE BIKE LOCK SAGA

Don’t get me started; don’t even get me started! I locked my super-rad orange road bike (you know, whatever) at a parking meter outside of Starbucks, where I was meeting So███ so we could work together (we both “work from home”). Once the day was done, I went back to my bike, only to discover that I didn’t have my keys in any of my four pants pockets, two jacket pockets, or five backpack compartments. I retraced my steps with So███: Starbucks, Chipotle, CVS, but was unable to find what I was searching for. In the Chipotle a solicitous individual volunteered his girlfriend’s (?) bike keys. Apparently, U-locks are so generic that you can often use random keys to unlock one. I tried, and in fact the woman’s key opened one of my locks. Unfortunately, I always use two, which meant my bike was still locked to the meter.

After a grumpy weekend of me idly wondering if I could borrow an angle grinder or perhaps use a two-by-four to pop the lock, I google “how to break a u lock” and discover a video showing a guy popping a lock in two minutes using a car jack. I’m sitting across from So███ when I learn about this, so I lean forward and ask her if she has a car jack I can borrow. She texts A███, and he drives over to pick her up and brings the jack. I expect the operation to take ten minutes, but it does not. In fact, the jack gets stuck on the lock, and it takes me maybe fifteen minutes of peeling away the lock’s rubber coating to free it. A███ and So███ leave while I keep trying. There are two American Red Cross canvassers on the sidewalk, and I listen to them pitching the whole time I try to pop my lock. Whenever there were joggers, the canvassers would say, “What are you running from?!” which I thought was kind of funny. The female canvasser was friendly to me: whenever I pried the car jack off, she would say, “Did you get it!!??” and I’d be like, “Ha, ha!! No. Oh my God, close though.”

After an hour of laboring clumsily over a car jack on a bike that keeps rolling around, one starts to feel like a right fool.

Christ Bananas, the effort this production took.

Finally, it happens. The lock comes off. Unfortunately, I rendered the front derailleur janky in the process of wrestling with the bike lock. So I walked my bike to a bike shop. I was very anxious, because I was wearing a particularly appropriated-bike-culture outfit (slim-fit jean shorts rolled just so at the cuffs, Brooklyn Industries polo shirt, Adidas Sambas with no socks), and was afraid the bike shop guys would hurt my feelings. But they were friendly enough, and fixed the front derailleur for free (it had only been knocked askew). Unfortunately, I also had somehow messed up the chain wheel in a way that would “run [me] about $100 to fix.” So from now on, I can only use the smaller front gear. Anyway.

On the bright side, looking for my spare bike keys, I found my long-lost eyeglasses rolled up in an air mattress.

HOW DID I GET SO BAD

 A█████ texts me and I say I’ll be there soon but I end up watching internet videos for half an hour before leaving. When I arrive, he is doing some bike maintenance. I sit there being empty-headed for a while. Av███ comes and sits next to me, but then he goes off somewhere. Later A█████ and I are grocery shopping. I pick up a tin of anchovies and say, “Anchovies are so expensive,” and he says, “Just put it in your pocket.”

Later, we walk to the pond and stash our stuff by the boathouse. I throw my wallet into a bush. A█████ says, “You just had to bring swim shorts that look like boxers.” When we get to the beach, there are some people there, but we figure they won’t care. The water is cold, but not so cold, and we walk in slowly until the water is navel height and then plunge in. The only building visible above the trees has most of its windows lit, and we swim in its direction, instead of directly toward the boathouse. I am an extremely weak swimmer and pretty much spend the entire time gasping and doggy-paddling. A█████ says, “Do you know the breast-stroke?” and I say, “I only know how to freestyle. But I have my contacts in.”

NEVER HAVE I FELT SO AMERICAN

J███ and Ar████ are going to IKEA, so I hitch a ride. We enter gridlock, and finally decide we have to stop and eat. We consult the telephone to see if there are any Chik-Fil-As around, but they are all either north or west of Boston Proper. We end up going to a Chipotle in an outlet mall. We talk about Chipotle: how it’s too bad David Foster Wallace passed, because now he can’t write an essay about eating Chipotle burritos in an outlet mall. I get a red chest of drawers and a black bookcase. When I tell S███ that I got a red chest of drawers, she says that that’s what men do: they get red things for their bedrooms, because they think that things in bedrooms should be red. They just don’t know any better.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE

I’m going to get what I want.

4.1 Alexander moves to Boston

I moved to Somerville, Massachusetts the beginning of this month. This is located in the greater Boston area, on a central subway line. I got a job near my house, at the UPS Store. While this job requires me to gain a great deal of technical knowledge over the course of a very short time, the job itself is very low stress, and I leave feeling unscathed and restful. Depending on how long it takes to close, I sometimes walk out to see the night’s sunset. I came to Boston on the Megabus, which only lets you check one bag. I left the rest of my things, including my bike, all my shoes but one pair, and nearly all my books, in New York. Those things are still there now, and I plan to get them eventually. I brought an air mattress that deflates so much that the fitted sheet often comes off by morning. The air mattress took up much of my one checked bag.

I chose to come to Boston by a process of elimination. I didn’t want to live abroad anymore, nor in Texas, nor the South, nor the Midwest, nor the West Coast. I wanted to live in a big city. I didn’t want to live in New York, where people seemed to me terribly self-involved. I think this self-involvement is the perverse result of the hysterical value New Yorkers place on self-sufficiency. I remember being on the Boston subway system once. A crazy man started screaming, and people were staring frankly at him. It was so refreshing. In New York, they would have all totally ignored it. Little things like that are what make New York so off-putting to me.

So I tentatively chose Boston. This decision became more and more definite as several friends, for one reason or another, decided to settle in the Boston area as well. I think my contentment in a place is directly influenced by my sense of community there, so it all panned out very well.

Though I am happy with my choice, I don’t think I will ever settle permanently in New England. Too brittle, too milquetoast, too gauche caviar. I refuse to be satisfied with anything, and much prefer to travel this wide old world, aloof from and contemptuous of everything I see, shrinking from touch, resenting what little love I am given, building walls around me which my soul can press against and be cradled by.

Incidentally, Josh Levin and I are starting a band.

3.3 February Vacation Adventures

I recently came off a two-week break. During the first week I spent four days heading conversation workshops in a high school in Mulhouse. I woke up at 5:30, took a shower, and made myself breakfast before trekking down the snowy sidewalks to the train station as the sun rose. At the same time every morning the streetlamps flicker a few seconds for no apparent reason — it makes me think of some sort of plot device in a Rupert-bear detective story. I actually am extremely fond of pre-dawn mornings — going out into the chilly wet darkness, when nobody else is around and the sky is a lightening grey. This feeling is undoubtedly the reason that church camp counselors wake the kids up early to go pray on the top of the mountain as the sun rises. The freshness and oddness of being made to wake up at an unusual time adds to the effect as well. And afterward, you have the entire day ahead of you and the promise of a good night’s sleep at the end of it, plus you’ve already showered and everything! Of course, it’s easy to sing the praises of early mornings now — talk to me again at 5:31am. Or after I’ve held a nine-to-five for a few months.

It was very snowy and cold the whole time, and all told I walked about an hour to an hour and a half each way in my commute to the high school in Mulhouse, so I bundled up in a lot more layers that I usually wear for my twenty-second commute to the Altkirch high school. It was nice to have a new batch of students to teach, since it meant I could ask all my old questions over again. “Tell me about a sport. Tell me about music. What are your hobbies?” One bizarre thing about these students was that three of them had a childish, borderline-autistic habit of not acknowledging me. Usually (almost universally), even if a student doesn’t know an answer or chooses not to answer, she will make some sort of nonverbal acknowledgement of the question, or at least of my attention — students automatically change their demeanor when they realize they have become the center of the instructor’s attention. With these students in Mulhouse, it was like they didn’t hear me at all. Whatever they were doing before I addressed them (usually staring into space, or looking at their fingers, or something comparable), they continued doing, as if they hadn’t heard me at all. Their eyes and face didn’t register any change at all. It was strange and disconcerting — I’d get the hysterical, surreal sense that they didn’t hear me, or that I actually hadn’t said anything to them and had only imagined it. They weren’t being purposefully subversive or disrespectful either — when they finally answered they were friendly, eager, and not unintelligent. Then when they stopped talking they slipped right back into this semi-conscious cocoon, and when I asked follow-up questions the whole process would start all over again. Strange, right? Either way, I was paid well for my time. This works toward solving the plane-ticket-home-or-six-hundred-dollars-worth-of-cocaine dilemma that’s been plaguing me — I certainly can‘t have both (yet), but the possibility of a satisfying compromise seems more feasible now. (Just kidding, Mom and future employers).

Then I chilled out for the rest of the week before spending the second week with my grandparents in Hilsenheim — chilling out some more. (Chilling for a bit, which seemed so appealing when I chose the title of my blog, has lost a large quantity of its charm from overuse). The only interesting thing I remember happening in the time between my teaching gig and my visiting the grandparents was the neighbor’s cat coming to play with me as I went out one evening to go grocery shopping. I crouched down and let it come on my lap, and I showered it with carresses and murmured love-words to it — “Pretty pretty kitty titty — chaircat of the pretty kitty committee!! Pretty itty bitty kitty. Precious! Precious!! Precious, precious kitty!!” After I finally got rid of it I discovered by the light of the streetlamps that it had tracked pawprints all over the front of my pants — I clapped them off as well I could, to spare the checkout-ladies at the Super-U from any uncomfortable conjectures they might otherwise have formed. But I’ll tell you something strange: though the cat betrayed me, I loved it all the more for its betrayal. Such is the nature of love.

In Hilsenheim, I watched a lot of German carnival coverage (in German) — it’s like Mobile Mardi Gras minus the beads, plus confetti and bunting, and with more people in masks, and more marching people in costumes supplementing the floats. Then I watched a lot of the Olympics. Some of those Alpine skiers had terrific falls — it reminds me of the folk-wisdom that people only watch Nascar for the crashes. Those people should just watch skiing — I’m surprised those women aren’t dead. One thing was especially shameful — a French skier just tumped over for no apparent reason within two seconds of the start of her run. But I’ll tell you what: those female skiers are the most wholesome, corn-fed women I’ve ever seen. I could imagine Magdalena Neuner with her hair tied up in a bandana, sweeping the mud out of her papa’s farmhouse after a flood.

And I lied about all that narrative stuff: of course there are some lifelong narratives one never escapes. The two defining ones for me are (1) my arrow-straight trajectory toward death and (2) my generally-improving grasp of the French language. Let’s leave aside the former for now in favor of the latter. I’d say that my grasp of French has, after many months at a plateau, started improving rapidly. Suddenly (it seems) my vocabulary has improved quantifiably and my grammar has become much more fluent and complex. For instance, I used the word “en” unconsciously for the first time recently — my uncle asked me if I had a return ticket from Sélestat, and I said without thinking, “Je dois en acheter” (I need to buy one). I guess that doesn’t sound very impressive. Also, I’m reading La vie est ailleurs (the author-reviewed French version of Life is Elsewhere) straight through without any problem — that would have been inconcievable five months, or probably even two months, ago. Further, I find myself pleasure-reading my Micro Robert dictionary, and then incorporating seamlessly the expressions I’ve taught myself into conversation. Look out Spanish, here I eventually come!