Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored without her, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko
Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk
light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I
could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good
sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and
very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape
with all its violence and violations and death threats
and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion.
Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used
his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I
protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to
do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted
into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry
noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that
he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's
right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I
focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith.
Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on
Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now
there was something between us. Another lie. I already
had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a
series of flirtations and one night stands that I
excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as
payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to
bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and
uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the
professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed
bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little
blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over
the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast
enough.
The end of anonymity
In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.
Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups.
The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name. The
e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail
account. The few blogging awards that went to Jennifer
Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.
My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an e-mail
to my ex-husband from the writing to survive account
and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a sneaking
suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited at least
once. A friend from elementary school found me here.
For a while the first hit on a Google search of my name
(yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the only one,
right?) was the blog, for reasons that are somewhat
mysterious. Until today, the two weren't directly
connected.
It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's
quite another to realize that people who may be a part
of my story are reading. Or that casual friends might
come upon this and find out more than they ever wanted
to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the door
ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed it.
What's there to hide? Just me.
So.
Here I am.
Jennifer Trinkle.
All other names have been changed to
protect the innocent. In most cases.
January's blog: this time this space
timethief
Happy new year! I'm starting it off
with a recommendation for a blog that will bring a
little light into your life: this time this
space.
Blogging goddess timethief tackles the issues,
including
gay rights,
population growth and
poverty in America. She also writes about her personal
struggles with depression and fibromyalgia. But the ultimate focus of her
intelligent and informative blog is personal
development.
this time this space keeps readers’ interest with posts
on topics ranging from conscious
living to
dreaming to sexuality and many points in between. All of
this information comes in a clean, easy-to-read
package. In fact, the entire production is a
professional affair, with thoroughly researched,
well-written posts. On occasion timethief brings in
knowledgeable guest bloggers to broaden the scope.
I first came across timethief on BlogCatalog
and my initial
impression still stands: here is a straightforward
woman who writes with kindness and political acumen,
who welcomes newbies with open arms and an accepting
heart. Her blogs – the other is one cool
site, which
focuses on WordPress tips with many other useful
blogging-related articles tossed into the mix – are
there to help, whether it is by smoothing the way to
open minds or helping us to create better blogs.
Both are must-reads.
What are words for?
So here are some pictures, a little holiday filler. I'll see if I can dredge up some writing before the end of the year.
Christmas morning pteranodon, courtesy of Uncle B.
Preparing the cioppino.
The final product.
Homemade Mexican
chocolate ice cream.
This year's inadvertent (but popular) theme: dinosaurs.
I'll be catching up on comments here,
there, and everywhere in the next couple of days.
Until next time ...
He sees you when you're sleeping
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and
within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the
first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large
window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in
view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with
parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the
not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right
place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved
in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a
better paying part-time job working in a library at a
high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out
his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his
routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange
combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more
to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to
my fellow college students. We were both in love with
DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the
insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick
rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political
celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and
headed straight for the District. He would tell me
stories of growing up the city, where his large family
lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic
in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid
architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like
they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile
as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his
own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC.
Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision
from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred
spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and
insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my early
evening library shifts where there was no one else in
the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the
pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch),
explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how
the destructive energy fields from power lines were
spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would
stare out the window at the office building across the
street, watch the after hours workers work or not work,
watch them watching us. There was one man who was
always talking on the phone, standing with his back to
the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between
head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us,
the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though
the person on the other end would be persuaded by
gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or
rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro
station on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont
Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my
escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings
at Andy’s were blurred through multiple
glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of
Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details
of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish
Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him
sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old
friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our
liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final
rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings
generally ended in an argument over something petty.
We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance
floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of
Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my
drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I
dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out
sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the
booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always
uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people
to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work
and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway
half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday
night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner
asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a
weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers,
maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy
box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to
my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty
at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing
November winds, floating through the incredible
sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas
were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think
as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the
joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a
battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last
round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every
intention of returning to DC immediately after
graduating from library school. But then I met a guy
who got a job and we moved to a new town together:
Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted
some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a
four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East
neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the
address, he was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told
me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house
was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood
home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag
up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another
day). Photo from Old
Towne East Neighborhood Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the
odds?
Writing prompt: Bone tired
Two notes: This is fiction. And for a much more encouraging take on "Fake it until you make it," check out the post The Greatest Love from the fabulous Melinda Roberts Tyler of Melindaville.
Image from It is
Called Mount Cope.
I’ve been reduced to this, eating cheese crumbs out of
my clothes, stepping over the cat puke on the rug,
shuffling outside in a pair of de-elasticized boxers
and a translucent t-shirt, ancient and holey, to get
the New York Times at 10:30 a.m.
Yeah, I’ll wave at you, neighbor woman from across the
street. Hello. Hello. I don’t know your name because
you never gave it to me. The first thing out of your
mouth when we moved here two years ago was “Don’t park
your car in front of my house again.” OK. Thanks for
the welcome, lady. That was when I cared, when my
skirts were crisped by the drycleaners, when I ran a
brush through my hair in front of a wiped-clean mirror,
when I spent half an hour every Saturday wrestling with
that damn morning glory vine on the fence to keep it in
line. I cared what you thought then, Neighbor, but I
don’t anymore.
No. I don’t give a fuck. I trace these two years gone
and if I cared I might wonder what happened. He left,
briefly, though he’s back now. We’re back to the
marriage bed, so to speak. I still can’t stand the feel
of his hand on my back, how his fingers trace their way
down to my ass. Fake it until you make it, the
expression goes. That’s his philosophy, anyway, and at
least he’s here. Says he’ll stay with me through this
little setback of mine. This emotional trough. He
claims to know what love is. This is it, supposedly.
But I don’t believe him and wait for him to
disappear.
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my stillbirth
story, I
was hemmed in by fact. I’d show it to my mother and
she would offer corrections to misplaced fictions,
give me her version of events. Some facts are
important. It is not acceptable to totally make
things up, to frame the innocent, or create
character flaws or strengths where none exist. I
wanted to be fair to my parents, which is a strange
impulse when documenting an unfair situation, but
why give fuel to the threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist Mark
Doty’s
piece on memoir, in which he describes his sister’s
wedding dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige
suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she choose beige
as a rebellious stand against traditional white? Was
the choice a result of parental pressure, the
(barely) pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit
after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision of the
dress so strong? Memory is elusive, impressionistic,
sometimes dead wrong. Facts are slippery. Doty
questions whether these facts always matter in the
telling of one's life story. Aren’t the impressions
real in their own sense, the memoir a murky middle
ground, a product of the "juncture
of memory and imagination"? In the end, imagination wins
out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out that my
mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal condition and couldn't
wear high heels − one of her legs was shorter than the
other − I had to rewrite a scene (since totally
excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home portion of
my stillbirth story. The sound of her heels clicking
against the linoleum floor, keeping time with my infant
mother's screams was almost irresistible to me, a
summing up of institutional efficiency and a baby's
wordless pain. But I had to change it, especially once
I discovered that my mother was a generally silent
baby, calm, and apparently tearless. The soundtrack of
nothing, no tears, no outward display of emotion, the
image of Aunt Ruth limping as she exited the building
with my stony-faced mother, was much more compelling
than a newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps.
Here was an infant who was already accustomed to being
ignored, a child who grew up under a heavy coat of
suppressed and private pain. This presentation of the
silent child − from my mother's memory of stories her
adoptive mother told her − deepened my understanding,
explained the emotion underlying her explosive temper,
the avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of course,
this is all my interpretation informed by imagination
and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I can’t
recreate the world of my childhood, but can remember
the feel of it. Does it matter if the house was truly
cavernous, whether the bathroom had mint-green tile,
whether it was Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does
not, but the story doesn’t develop without description,
without a sense of the reality of place and time. Many
facts don’t change, of course, and those facts are the
bones of our life stories, fleshed out with language,
given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my fictional
pieces, and even then the lines are blurred) happened.
When I can't remember something, I take my impression
and create a reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing and a great
Julian Barnes quote on creating fact out of fiction,
please check out this
post from
Scottish writer Jim Murdoch's fine blog,
The Truth About
Lies.***
Writing prompt: There is grace in that direction
Photo from
apartment therapy.
“If only I was drunk,” she thought, remembering those
tales of drivers fueled by alcohol miraculously
surviving car-totaling accidents, their floppy limbs
and carefree attitudes rescuing them from death.
Extricated from smashed tin-can cars, they get up and
walk away with a sprained wrist or broken toe while
their sober counterparts are Medivaced and rushed to
emergency surgery. Then she remembered: she was drunk.
This wasn’t normal. “Really, this is an outlying
event,” she pictured telling the paramedics. “This is
not my standard Tuesday afternoon.” Her stressful
weekend had bled into the week and she couldn’t stand
the muscle tension, her shoulders pulled tight, the way
her tendons held her limbs at awkward angles. Victoria
couldn’t even hug her husband properly. Unconvinced by
his warmth, by his beating heart so close and
welcoming, her body maintained its stiffness. She felt
like an impassive observer as her hands thumped him on
the back, a prelude to withdrawal.
When Laura suggested sharing a bottle of wine with
lunch, Victoria thought: why not? It beats valium. The
crisp Sauvignon blanc complemented her crab salad. They
each had a tiny glass of Port at the end of the meal
over a shared piece of chocolate cake. She felt
marvelous.
No. Not drunk. Just a little tipsy, a little loose.
Maybe she wasn’t hurt after all. Victoria slowly raised
her right arm, then her left. She moved her head from
side to side, bent a leg. Sore. Bruised but not broken.
Her tailbone ached, and her left hip was probably
turning purple, the broken blood vessels leaking into
her muscle fibers. She turned around, pushed herself
up. How would she explain this one to Barry? Oh, it was
easy enough. Chris was in the habit of leaving his toys
right by the stairs and both she and her husband had
almost tripped multiple times. Maybe this would
convince her son to be more careful. Even though he had
nothing to do with it.
Once she was off the floor, Victoria inched her way up
the stairs, favoring her left leg. To better assess the
damage, she went into the bedroom, stripped down to her
underwear and stared at her battered image in the
mirror. Years before she had fantasized about taking up
boxing as a way to get out built-up anger. Intrigued by
the idea of sanctioned violence, she wanted the thrill
of knocking her fist into another human being, but had
never worked up the nerve to sign up for lessons.
Victoria balled her freckled hands and took jabs at the
mirror as she danced and swayed. Her hip was as dark
and soft as a ripe plum. One of her cheeks was
yellowing and there was a thin line of clotted blood
coming from her nose. Her back ached. But the tension
was totally gone.
Writing prompt: Many in the park are reading the white butterfly
I love that cabbage butterfly as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!
Tomas Tranströmer, "Streets in Shanghai"
Photograph from
Wired New
York
Many in the park are reading the
white butterfly. Or worshipping the wrinkling God,
exposing their winter-white limbs to the sun. Backs
against thin towels, resting on hodgepodge quilts or
supported by near-dead grass, they lie among the
remains of dog shit and crushed beer cans. Four months
of relative darkness, of travel wishes: the sea and sky
clear, the beach unpeopled, a tropical drink supported
by sand. Stuck in the city for the long haul, they
celebrate the coming of spring.
They travel from studio apartments, from many-windowed
penthouses, stream in from the train station, form in
groups released from grubby cubicles. Maybe they are
cutting school, calling in sick. It could be that they
don’t have anywhere to be in the first place.
She props herself up on her elbows, surveys the
landscape of bodies. Across a line felled by desire, a
white butterfly floats, a promise fulfilled.