* includes bootleg material edited from the upcoming ENCORE PERFORMANCE of the show, Thursday 9/23 at 9:30 at Dixon Place! Get your tickets now before this one sells out like the last time!
…In the seventh grade we built our dream home!
While it was under construction we spent nine months in a unit of the Jefferson Place Apartments, during which time a handsome, mysterious, and itinerant neighbor man from Georgia showed my brother and me a few wrestling maneuvers – and also for some unknown reason contracted with my father to teach us boys a water safety course. Yes, there was a time in my life when I knew how to fashion a makeshift life vest from a pair of blue jeans! Who was that handsome man, and where did he go? He had a face of unexpected angles, piercing blue eyes, and an accent much thicker than ours – one that suggested red dirt and towering pine trees, and the things two men might do together on top of one and in the shade of the other. In many ways I feel left out of recent trends because I never was molested; it might have been nice had he approached me in that way, but isn’t life just full of near misses?
The house we built was next door to my mother’s parents – my Nanny and Papaw – on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a rare small hill on East Bluebell Drive. (5012 for those of you with your Map of the Stars’ Homes unfolded in your lap!) It was in the style of what might be termed “Carolina Farmhouse,” with a front porch running along the first floor and a clapboard façade painted a cream color that I called “farm-fresh butter” (although no one else did). I also gave the house a name (again, which no one else used): I called it Twin Elm, after the two giant American Elm trees that stood awkwardly close to one another in the front yard (an unusual species in South Louisiana – like me!). Naturally I had been inspired by repeated viewings of Gone With the Wind and my childhood visits to many of the local plantation homes. I regret to say that – although Mother has downsized to another home nearby and Twin Elm is no longer ours– the elms are no longer, period: they have quite literally gone with the wind, victims of Hurricane Gustav a couple of summers back.
The demise of these paired spires brings to mind another similar twin collapse I witnessed in the fall of 2001. And although this is jumping through time quite a bit (I don’t know how a “normal” mind works!), readers will surely want to know “where was I when the towers fell?” Because I was very close! The event now known as 9/11 – but which I for a long time referred to only as “the Eleventh” for the same reasons of class and sophistication that the Times says “the Modern” instead of “MoMA” – came, as George W. Bush said in the only correct statement of his presidency, “on an ordinary Tuesday” – or whatever it was he said. A clear September morning? A clear blue sky? All are accurate.
Where was I? In session with my therapist, although Mother later adjusted the story for her friends to say I’d been at the dentist. I entered Joanne’s office merely depressed, but when my forty-five minutes were up I emerged devastated into a new New York. I looked down Mercer Street and saw the two towers smoking. Inconceivable. And worse, I really had to do a number two. I mean, not in a good way at all. Like when you’ve had whiskey for dinner and coffee for breakfast. Like any streetwise New Yorker I have my secret toilet map of the city stored in my mind, and at the time I was a regular visitor to an NYU classroom building nearby that had a very quiet bathroom on the second floor. I realize the moment called for more…well, moment… but this simply had to be attended to. My bowel movement was brief and unpleasant, and on my way out I passed an open office in which a young black man was watching history unfold on a tiny television – he screamed, “it’s falling!”
I ran to Washington Square and stood under the arch, next to a bas-relief of our country’s founding father. Only one solitary smoking tower remained, where always there had been two. Surely it was beyond comprehension when they both were gone – but these implausible minutes when the one surviving twin still stood were to me even eerier. I shared a silent look of despair with two French tourists – what could have been said, even if I did understand the ridiculous sing-song jibber-jabber of their superfluous nation? As ever, my favorite quote of Washington’s about the new republic stood carved high above my head: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”
Over to Sixth Avenue I staggered and briefly waited in line at a pay phone, only to discover it wasn’t working anymore. Neither were the cell phones of course. I wanted to call my mother. I began to walk uptown, heading nowhere in particular with the crowd, many of whom were coated in dust. Between 9th and 10th Streets, by the old Jefferson Market, I heard voices rising and turned to see the second tower falling. I screamed like an ape, and people stared – and not in the way they do now, when I am – as frequently happens – recognized by celebrity hounds. Later, as I was sobbing in the street, a woman asked me “did you lose somebody?”
“No,” I told her, “but I live here.”
I lined up to give blood at St. Vincent’s (one trembles to think what we’ll do next time with that life-saving facility soon to become a Whole Foods, or some other retailer of equivalent spiritual bankruptcy). This I did despite the fact that the Red Cross generally refuses the blood of homosexuals (or if they don’t I think they do). While in line I saw in the street an old college friend named Eric, who hasn’t really amounted to much. In school we’d been in a novella writing sequence together, and mine concerned a group of archaeologists at a dig along the Gulf Coast of Alabama. I’d been captivated on a childhood beach trip by the legend of the lonely wife of Hernando deSoto, who according to a plaque I might have misread had futilely awaited her husband’s return from his ill-fated inland venture on a tiny spit of land at the outlet of Mobile Bay. Waiting for one who won’t return seems an apt image in a remembrance of the Eleventh – it recalls the unbearable heartbreak of all those thousands of MISSING flyers that were staple-gunned below 14th Street in the aftermath like bad wallpaper – faces of the dead I came to know through repetition, though they were strangers to me. I read them all; I thought their souls were owed as much. Of course I don’t remember what Eric’s novella was about – but I doubt it was as interesting, and I’m not sure if he’s written anything since, besides his regular film reviews for Time Out that I’m sure barely support his wife and child.
Everyone reacts differently to tragedy: I brought socks to the Javits Center and had a brief dalliance with a man named Jonathan who had me act out rape fantasies on him in exchange for crystal methamphetamine. Perhaps it was all a bit misdirected – but the Eleventh was entirely unprecedented. I was frightened, and I cannot help my fears. Those who are great are also greatly troubled; if we weren’t we would probably be fine just selling insurance like the rest of the world. But that is something I could never do: I am too offended by the concept of the deductible.
At any rate, those days are always with me, just as are the sad days of my lonely, unmolested youth. I see the second tower fall quite often, whenever I’m on Sixth Avenue headed toward Bigelow’s pharmacy for one of their house-made specialty toners to which my skin responds so well. After all, as Faulkner wrote – quite correctly – “the past is never really dead – it isn’t even past.” The man could really overburden a dependent clause, but I’ll have to give him that one.
