Juju

Last weekend, I was home in Rhode Island, hanging out with Mum, Jean, Pat, and Miss Lucy. I barely left Jean and Pat’s house. I slept over. We spent hours just hanging out, playing with Lucy, talking, watching her sleep, and then a nice long walk on the beach. It was beautiful, beautiful weather and perfect all around. I drove home on Sunday, an uneventful ride, which got me to my apartment at around 3 p.m. – I have this whole thing with TIME these days, which I will spare you – but there are certain slivers of time that I feel I have to either avoid or take advantage of. There is definitely something neurotic there, and I’m working with it, trying to be more flexible, all that. Suffice it to say, I arrived home at just the right time. It gave me hours of the day left, where I could putter around, and clean, and cook, and do all my weekend chores. It was very relaxing. And so I started the week on a strong note. Very important.

This week, I had lunch with Brooke one day. As I said, I am trying to come out of my shell. I have been cringing away from company for various reasons. Brooke was at my reading, of course, and so we had lunch, and talked about it – in a really deep way – and we also plotted my revenge which Brooke seems to feel, somehow, will take place at Trader Joe’s. Good to know. Much laughter. “Why do you keep bringing up Trader Joe’s??” I asked. It was so good to hang out with her. Flexing my social muscles again.

Another day I had breakfast with Rachel. It was so funny – she showed up at the diner a bit after me, and she sat down and said something like, “I’m so proud of us … look at us … living in New York and having breakfast like real grown-up people!” It made me LAUGH because it was such a specific sentiment and I had been thinking the exact same thing. Doesn’t matter how long you have lived here. There is still sometimes a consciousness about it: Look at me. Living in New York! It was really really cool, I haven’t hung out with her in a while, so there was much to catch up on. It was awesome.

On Friday, Allison and I had a sleepover planned at her apartment. It has been so long since we hung out, and I only got to talk to her for a couple seconds at the reading. We met up at the Jane St. Tavern and had dinner, talking and catching up. I regaled her with the story of my experiences when I went to pick up my car that was towed. I need to write it all down. It was a microcosm of humanity. Then we went to her place, got in our pajamas, crawled into bed, and watched a fabulous Dateline that she had saved for me. We love to watch things like that. Anything to do with crimes and cops and forensics … we can’t get enough. We paused to have big long discussions about the whole thing. It’s hysterical – it’s one of our favorite things to do with each other. There’s a Titanic exhibit going on right now in Times Square and we made plans to go to that, maybe this coming weekend. I can feel the sea-change. Starting to say Yes to things again.

Also this week I had a phone conversation with Kate – which was months in the making. We keep in touch as much as possible, but there has just been NO TIME to catch up – her schedule, mine, we play phone tag, we show up on each other’s Facebook pages – but she finally called me when I happened to be available (and sitting and watching Slings & Arrows no less – she was the one who turned me on to Slings & Arrows) and it was SO GOOD to talk to her. Man, I have MISSED her. We laughed hysterically about Slings & Arrows, we gave each other the bullet points of our lives, we caught up – and it just did my heart so good to hear her voice again. Enough with the emails and the Facebook. I miss her. We have just been missing each other for months – leaving messages, calling back, leaving messages – so that was a real gift of the week.

I also had a great phone conversation with Mitchell. He called me immediately upon exiting the Michael Jackson movie and needed to talk about it with me. It was awesome awesome. Again, grief can be an isolating thing. It’s a very odd sensation, and hard to describe. A wall separates you from normal life for a while. There’s a reason why people wore black armbands back in the old days. A public signifier: “I am working under some stress right now. Please take that into consideration.” But it’s been so nice to talk about OTHER things – as difficult as it sometimes is – and I absolutely loved ranting and raving about Michael Jackson with Mitchell, and hearing all of his thoughts. It was also his birthday last week. Happy birthday!!

I got up Saturday morning, Allison made coffee, and I trekked back through the drizzly morning to my apartment. Had a lovely quiet day – with NO INTERNET (damn busted modem) – so I read, and wrote – and watched a couple episodes of Slings & Arrows. It was Halloween. Cashel’s birthday!! Mum is out in Los Angeles now, so we have been getting daily email updates from her about all the fun things they are doing. It makes me happy. I wish I was out there. But it makes me happy to think of everyone being together out there, celebrating Cash’s birthday.

On Halloween night, I was going to an event called Sinister Six Must Be Destroyed. A film festival, which has been going on for a couple of years, held at the Millennium Film Workshop on East 4th Street. There were 12 films being screened, all in the horror genre, and none of them is longer than 10, 15 minutes. 12 different directors. I had gotten an invite on Facebook from Jeremiah – he had directed one of the films – so I figured, what the hell, sounds like a BLAST. Jen was coming with me. We were so looking forward to it. I had some stress about commuting into Manhattan because we would be arriving at the very same moment that the Halloween parade started. Seemed no way around it. It was going to be mayhem. And it was. We met up in Hoboken and had a drink first (all of the waitresses at this joint were dressed up as Moulin Rouge girls – they all looked fabulous) and then Jen started stressing that she didn’t have a costume, so we went back to her place and she put on some cat-eye glasses and a leopard print headband. She looked like Jan from Grease. I was wearing my enormous pink glasses, featured here many many MANY times. They make me look like an overly-earnest vaguely incompetent gender studies professor at an unaccredited college.

It was so fun to be going out and doing something utterly ridiculous and silly with Jen. I have some crowd anxiety these days, so strolling into the midst of the Halloween Parade freaked me out a bit, but it ended up being absolutely glorious. We stood in the PATH station, waiting for our train, and literally NOBODY on the platform was in regular dress. Everyone was in costume, heading in to see the parade. We saw a couple wearing matching lobster suits, sipping on soda, and arguing about something and then making up. We saw three adorable bodacious young women, dressed as Daisy Duke. We saw men in drag. We saw an entire soccer team from Italy, co-ed apparently. There was a dude on the train in head to toe yellow – yellow jacket, pants, shirt, tie, and then a jaunty white hat. He was either a pimp or an evangelical preacher. What’s the difference, right? He looked fabulous. We saw devils and frogs and one 6 foot tall guy was dressed as a fuzzy yellow chick. It was totally awesome. Jen and I had a blast, just looking around us and appreciating everyone. 9th Street, where we got off, brings new levels of meaning to the word MAYHEM. It was Parade Central. We watched a man dressed as a Christmas tree struggle up the stairs against the crowd. It was impossible to move. A jaunty gentleman wearing a gold-silk dressing gown cut in front of us in line. We were laughing too hard to mind. There were St. Pauli girls, people dressed as Santa’s elves, mermaids – all of us crammed onto the one stairway to the street. God help anyone who was trying to go the other way.

The streets were blocked off. We walked across 9th Street, in the middle, going against the tide of mummies and witches and ghouls, all heading West towards the parade. There’s something liberating about walking in the middle of an empty street in Manhattan. It makes you feel like it’s the Rapture, or something. It’s unnatural. And freeing.

The rain had started to come down. Nobody seemed to mind. There were still some straggling trick-or-treaters out with their parents. It was about 7:30 pm at this point. We saw a small furry bear, about 2 years old, weeping uncontrollably, as his sugar high crashed down around his ears. We walked by a small group of little girls, walking with their mothers, all dressed as Snow White and Harry Potter, and they were singing the Star Spangled Banner at the tops of their lungs, I kid you not. We saw whores and priests, angels and demons, mingling on street corners. I love the incongruity most of all. Some guy dressed as an ice cream sandwich having a = tiff with his girlfriend who was dressed as Delilah. You know. Awesomeness personified.

We made it to our destination, the streets significantly less cray-cray on that side of town. We picked up our tickets, and were handed 3-D glasses for one of the films, and also a program. We went and found seats in this nice big echoey screening room, with about 100 seats. The place was packed. Again, everyone was costume. We saw Sweeney and Mrs. Todd, he had a blood-stained apron, she had a blood-stained bodice. They were eating slices of pizza and drinking from a silver flask. There was a witch sitting in front of us, and she thoughtfully smushed the pointy top of her hat down so that we could see. There was a guy there dressed as Hunter Thompson – no, no, he was CHANNELING Hunter Thompson. The glasses, the long cigarette holder, the bald spot, the jaunty shirt and khaki pants – he looked unbelievable. He WAS Hunter Thompson. At one point we glanced over at the aisle, and we saw a black-clad Ninja standing there, totally still, scanning the crowd for his friends. There was a woman with fairy wings who appeared to be Titania. She also had on a crown. Jen and I were having so much fun. We didn’t know anyone. Everyone there appeared to be somehow connected to the event – actors, directors, organizers – but it was a welcoming fun bunch.

There were 6 films screened in the first half, then a brief intermission, and then another 6 films. It was so much fun. Some were gorier than others, some were more psychologically horrifying – but there was a TON of blood. And a TON of naked girls, a staple of the genre. Afterwards, as Jen and I tromped back across town to the PATH train, the rain really coming down by then, we talked about all the films, things we liked, things we didn’t like (“You know,” I said, “at some point I started getting Naked Woman Fatigue.”) – but all in all, it was a total BLAST. We had had no idea what to expect going in.

We kept wondering when the 3-D glasses would be needed. It ended up being for a film called “Aracattack”. Now. Just looking at that title it should be obvious what the subject matter was, but it somehow went over my head. I put on the 3-D glasses, all psyched, and then it dawned on me: “ARAC”. ARAC plus 3-D?? Oh hell to the no. People were HOWLING with laughter throughout – and Jen, who has the same phobia, so much so that, like myself, she cannot even call “them” by their real names – and instead refers to them, across the board as “manus”. As in: “I saw a manu in my closet today.” – was ROARING with laughter and convinced me to put on my glasses. “Sheila, they’re so fake – don’t worry …” “You mean, like Gilligan’s Island?” I whispered at her. She said, with a sudden change of expression, “No. THAT was really scary.” hahahaha So I put on my glasses, and these things, these manus, were so RIDICULOUS – they were like stuffed animals, with blinking maniacal electric eyes, and the acting in the film was so over-the-top and campy. At one point, the exterminator, a macho guy who looked like Chris Daughtry, was trying to calm a woman down because of the manus. She stood beside him, and he was looking off into the distance, assessing the danger – and to keep her calm he, without looking at her, reached out and cradled her tit. But it was as though he was stroking her shoulder. Like, “there there, this will make you feel better. BOOB.” It was THAT kind of experience. Hilarious. The worst part however was, when the film ended, and the lights went out, someone threw handfuls of plastic manus into the audience, and they rained down upon us in the darkness. All freakin’ hell broke loose. I heard Jen screaming at the top of her lungs (I am laughing out loud as I type this) – and EVERYONE was screaming, and then dissolving into laughter. I forced myself to not flee into the night. And managed to sit through the rest of the films, fully aware, that I was literally SURROUNDED by plastic manus. In fact, I discovered one tangled up in the fringe of my scarf during one of the other films, and almost had to leave the premises.

Jeremiah’s film was beautiful, haunting, shot in black and white, and had a real mood to it. It felt longer than 10 minutes, and that is a compliment. He focused on character and experience, rather than plot. And the way he shot the opening scene in the dining room, with the sunlight gleaming through the curtains, making the cutlery seem symbolic somehow, talismanic, was really beautiful. Strangely, the lead actor is a friend of Jen’s. The second he appeared she exclaimed, “Hey! I know him!” I have heard a lot about Jeremiah’s work, and I follow his “Production Diaries” on House Next Door with great interest (he’s a lovely writer), so it was really fun to actually see some of it.

The lights came up at the end of the night, and Jen and I both, as one, slowly bent down to see the HUNDREDS of manus all over the floor, on our shoes, in our cuffs, piled up all around us. I came home and found one in my bag. Had a nervous breakdown PROMPTLY even though I knew the damn thing was fake. We had had so much fun. We gingerly tiptoed our way out of the aisle, giggling, talking about how awesome the whole night had been.

Jeremiah was there, we’ve only met once, but I introduced myself again, and his friend Judd was with him – I’ve met him a couple of times at Keith and Dan’s – and it was nice to have a brief chat. It had been a really fun night.

It was about 11 p.m. when Jen and I emerged into the rainy night, and we started back across town. There was a wilder feeling in the streets, more unruly, and New York’s finest were out in force, clumped up on every streetcorner, watching guard. People were drunker now than they were at 7 p.m. obviously, so you could feel the entire thing was on the verge of collapsing.

6th Avenue was open again, but that was kind of a moot point. People staggered around EVERYWHERE.

Here were some things we saw on our walk to the PATH train. The streets were, at times, so crowded, that Jen and I held hands, for fear of getting separated.

— A girl who was obviously the spirit of Michael Jackson in heaven. Wings, little black dress, with Michael Jackson pins all over the dress.

— a dude on the PATH ride home who was dressed as a Purel bottle of hand sanitizer, complete with bar code on his back

— A statuesque woman standing in front of the Duane Reade, wearing a bodice with a push-up bra, and it was so much a PUSH-UP apparatus that her boobs had popped out and we saw her gyrating dark nipples at almost point-blank range.

— A guy who was dressed as the “dick in a box”

— The detritus of the parade in the PATH station. Random colored feathers, sequins, and two crumpled red socks.

— A girl dressed as what looked like Olivia Newton-John in the 80s (bright pink leggings, headband, white sweatshirt) making out with a guy dressed as Burger King, complete with crown. They were totally into each other, clawing and groping, and jen and I could not stop laughing looking at them.

I was home and in bed by midnight.

Woke up early the next morning, daylight savings, an extra hour. I had this strange sense of well-being. Nowhere to go, nothing really to do – I mean, I had laundry, but that was normal. I have writing to do, but I’m always doing that. It was a brisk grey day, and there was this weird sense – and I’m almost superstious about it, afraid to name it – that some of the bad juju I’ve had for months now was … not present. If you’ve ever lived with bad juju, you know it’s always there. You have good days, bad days, but the bad juju is omnipresent. As I say, this year has been so rough that I hesitate to name anything anymore … but all I know is what I felt on Sunday. I put on my workout clothes, took my iPod and went for a walk for over two hours. I went and visited my dead boyfriend for the first time since I don’t know when. I went my normal route, which I have been avoiding like the plague, because the last time I went on that route, on my walk/run, was in May, early June, before the really bad juju came. And I definitely had a couple of moments where I remembered, where I could feel my brain going down that path … but that in and of itself is a change. For months now, it has felt like I had no choice. Again, if you are familiar with grief, you know what I am talking about. It is disorienting. The grief is still here, it always will be, but the bad JUJU – from mid-June till now – definitely felt like it was on its way out. The tide pulling back. Often, what they say about depression is true: it is not SADNESS, it is the absence of feeling that is the killer. THAT is the thing that makes people go insane. However, I have had too much feeling, not an absence, the feeling burned me up with its intensity. Unstoppable. For months.

On my mega-walk on Sunday, I could feel a bit of SPACE around everything else. I don’t know what to call this whole thing except bad juju and all I can say is: bad juju leaves no room. All avenues of escape are closed to you. There is no respite. With such unrelenting onslaughts, the corresponding reaction is often one of increased rigidity, because that is the only way I feel in control. This is partly what I was talking about earlier, with the time thing, and my experience of time as being open to me only at certain parts of each day, and if I miss the moment, I can’t get it back. My routines get more rigid, as a way to combat the bad juju.

Sunday I felt some breathing room. Some space. I had room, space, to go out for a walk for the entire afternoon. On the walk, I had room to think, laugh out loud about the aracattack and other things, and also, sometimes, cry. It’s exhausting. Living under the regime of bad juju.

I am still not out of the woods, but all I really wanted to say was that over the last week, with its gentle social swirl, not too much for me to handle, films and friends and family, I felt, for the first time in months, that I actually had room and space, to survey the wreckage, take stock, and gather my forces for what might be ahead. I am highly suspicious of platitudes and statements that seem to come from a too-easy place. This year has been truly harrowing. I have not been able to be present – in so many different situations – in months, maybe over a year. Even just two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do all of those things in one single week. I would have burnt out two days in, and called friends to re-schedule, so I had more time to recover, in between each social event. How can lunch with a dear friend be so potentially exhausting that it is the only social event you can allow yourself in a week?

If you have any experience with bad juju, you will understand.

Today, my muscles ache from my walk. It makes me feel alive.