Baked
I rolled up to Wegman’s at precisely 8:13 AM, threaded my chain through my bike’s body and wheels, locked it to the rack, detached the front basket and walked over the already-melting asphalt toward the entrance. As the sliding doors parted, hitting the air conditioning felt like slamming into a block of ice, but it calmed my anxiety like water to fire. I removed my face mask, scraped my sweat-soaked hair into an elastic and grabbed a cart from the “sanitized” row.
The place was already packed and there was a combative energy blowing through the produce section that could sear a steak. I spied what appeared to be a couple of middle-aged divorcées, dressed in their summery best, carts packed with prepared foods fit for the Friday night superspreaders they were surely planning – rotisserie chickens, packages of pulled pork and that omnipresent supermarket guacamole, preserved with a nearly lethal dose of citric acid that’ll pickle your tongue for days. The loud clacking of their high-heeled wooden platforms added a particularly frenzied touch. Their male counterparts, cluelessly perusing the produce, did their best to evade them, holding out for women half their age, who in turn wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. The scene was starting to make me tense, so I took a deep breath, grabbed some Champagne grapes in passing and sprinted over to the prepared food section. I scooped up a to-go sashimi platter, sailed past the endless shelves of organic tea and made a beeline for the imported cheeses. After much deliberation I placed a wedge of Roquefort and a round of Délice de Bourgogne in my cart and threw in a box of rosemary and sea salt Crunchmasters and a deli container of olives I found at an adjacent display. I skipped the pricey olive oil and balsamic in the neighboring aisle since I still had a few drops of both at home, but a bottle of agrumato caught my eye so I nestled it carefully atop my backpack which was occupying my cart’s toddler seat. I had a log of Chèvre at home that was a month past the expiration date, but I knew it would still taste great with some backyard tomatoes, a splash of the agrumato and a nice, dry bottle of Cava to wash it all down.
I wheeled over to the fish case and perused the salmon but it was pre-cut and packaged in shrink wrap so I passed. I stopped by the cured meats enticed by the organic bacon, which I inspected for several minutes. A few feet further down, a package of Weisswurst caught my eye. I envisioned it boiled and cradled in a mustard-schmeared French roll, but my cholesterol was in the red zone last time I had it checked, so I passed on that too. Continuing on to the poultry section, I selected a small free-range chicken, and in keeping with la ricette de Thomas Keller, I’d roast that sucker at 450, and smother it in organic butter and fresh thyme.
I rolled over to the dairy case which was clear of people except for a couple of Karens perusing the cream cheese, but they exited the aisle as soon as I arrived. Blissfully alone, my attention progressively shifted to the piped-in Muzak which happened to be Pink Floyd’s Animals, while the faint smell of bleach, ubiquitous since lockdown, reassured me that at least at this very moment, everything was right in the world.
I had planned on making a week’s worth of tzatziki, but I’d foolishly forgotten to pick up some cucumbers in the produce section, which I’d rather have died than gone back for. So I skipped the liter of Greek yogurt, grabbed a pound of cultured butter (for the chicken) and headed over to the beer aisle. On the way I passed a cranky old boomer wearing a Make Ocasio-Cortez Bartend Again hat, his cart stacked to the brim with Genesee Cream Ale and Sahlen’s hot dogs, ostensibly for a Bills tailgate party later in the afternoon. He sneered at me as I passed, the way those motherfuckers invariably do whenever they lay eyes on anyone under forty, and I had to resist the temptation to snatch the hat off his head along with the tawdry polyester wig he had stuffed underneath it. Though I had "lifted" a 2016 Premier cru Meursault Charmes from the restaurant which would positively slap with the cheeses, the thought of drinking the entire bottle by myself struck me as rather outré. I persuaded myself that it perhaps would be best saved for a special occasion, so just for shits and giggles I picked up a few bottles of Rochefort 6 Trappist Ale for seven bucks apiece.
Though it occurred to me how absurd it was to be buying items of such pronounced extravagance on my meager line cook’s salary (the cruel irony not lost on me that I could nary afford to eat at the restaurant at which I was employed), I convinced myself that I made up for it by partaking in the staff meals at work. And though the meals were actually better than decent, half the time there was nothing left after the servers went back for seconds or thirds before the BOH could afford to take a break. Cunts. In that case I found nothing wrong with copping a couple of goat cheese-stuffed, prosciutto-wrapped figs from the walk-in. Or grabbing something out of the six pans at the pantry station when no one was looking. Or swiping a Gorgonzola-stuffed banana pepper when the pizza chef stepped away from his station. I once happened upon some handmade chocolate truffles in the low boy under the pastry chef’s station and scarfed them down when I thought no one was looking. She being no fool however, saw the cacao powder smeared on my chef’s coat and said that if I ever tried it again, on no uncertain terms she’d break my neck. I believed her too – I once saw her eviscerate a server who made the unfortunate decision to call her a fucking bitch, and I don’t believe he’ll ever call anyone that again. To their face, anyway. On top of it, she was fit as fuck, not to mention smokin’ hot. All the guys and some of the gals were on that razor’s edge between libidinous and terrified of her, but it didn’t matter – you got the idea she knew she was way too good for any of us and she was dating one of the Bills’ defensive linemen to boot.
I wheeled my cart over to the ice cream aisle and considered buying a pint of Jeni’s Brandied Banana Brulée but it would surely melt by the time I got home. I had a few strands of the saffron I “borrowed” from the restaurant’s dry storage in my cupboard, but I had run out of rosewater and pistachios for the bastani I had planned to make later in the week and threw those into the cart as well.
They say you shouldn’t shop when you’re hungry and I guess you could say the same thing about being high, because by the time I was ready to check out, my cart was nearly full. I had withdrawn my last two-hundred dollars from the ATM at the 7-Eleven on South Park that morning, but I broke into a cold sweat when I realized that it must have spilled out of my backpack’s outer pocket as I had failed to secure the closure on the ride over. To make matters worse, I was already late on my credit card payments, so attempting to use one would have been out of the question. To avoid further embarrassment, I casually dumped the cart in the cereal aisle (after slipping one of the ales into my backpack), feigned having forgotten something, backtracked up the same aisle, made a U-turn down the next one, and sauntered through the baking aisle unable to decide if it calmed me or intensified my paranoia. Smiling amiably underneath my face mask, I nonchalantly exited through one of the unmanned checkout lanes, stuffing a three-count pack of Ferrero Rocher truffles under my T-shirt and ambled toward the exit.
I walked back out into the heat glancing behind me the whole way, but I hadn’t set off any alarms and I didn’t see security tailing me. I freed my bike from the rack and placed my backpack inside the basket. I put my helmet on and mounted the bike, but I must have hit that pothole on the way over harder than I had thought because my front tire was completely flat. In my frustration I reached into my backpack, uncapped the pilfered bottle of ale and gulped the cold delicious nectar figuring I’d need the hydration for the long walk home. Payday was still two days away, but I had four singles in my bag that I’d kept aside for bus fare, so in lieu of going home to an empty refrigerator, I stopped for a slice at a takeout window along the way, and perched on an outdoor picnic table gobbled it down with the purloined chocolates and the rest of the ale. Suddenly, I heard a thunderclap out of the east and then a massive black cloud appeared on the horizon, moving rapidly overhead and releasing a deluge of biblical proportions which soaked everything in its path. Dragging my bike through the curtain of rain, I stopped at the Orchard Park St. overpass and tossed my empty bottle into Cazenovia Creek. Dazed and still hungry, I watched it slowly float away in the muddy current until it finally disappeared from view. I took the long way home.
*Originally published in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, November, 2023
https://mobiusmagazine.com/fiction/baked.html
The Art of Memory
The building sat mid-block on the east side of Van Damme Street wedged between a taxi garage and an indoor ice rink and diagonally across from the Queensboro Correctional Facility. I climbed the steps to the entrance, grasped the dented brass handle and leaned my weight into its heavy, metal door. My bare arm stuck momentarily to its oily layer of cobalt paint while I contemplated its incongruity with the edifice’s bare, cinder block façade. At the center of the door at eyeline was a small, rectangular window sandwiching crisscrossed metal wires between two thin panes of glass. Past this interweaving of filaments appeared a room, whose hive-like activity resembled a video on that glass surface, its dimensions inadvertently mimicking the aspect ratio of a current day smart phone. At the same moment I was reminded by this fenestral fortification that the city, since I had arrived thirty years before, was safer albeit profoundly less interesting, and I was forced once again to acknowledge my resentment toward those recent suburban transplants who had quietly crept up on us in the aftermath of that monstruous and unforeseen attack of the early millennium and who had no need for my generation’s paranoia about crime nor the mundane drone of anxiety that infused our every transaction.
If the weather was fine, I’d walk the twenty blocks from Sunnyside Gardens where I lived, heading west on Forty-Eighth Avenue, avoiding the traffic that raced down Queens Boulevard. Otherwise, I’d climb the stairs to the Forty-Sixth Street station where the number seven train runs, antecedently huddling underground at its origin in Flushing, then ascending the tracks to run swift and high above Roosevelt Avenue, past Willet’s Point where the Mets play, and over the roofs of the bodegas and taquerias and Indian sweet shops that line the streets of Corona and Jackson Heights. At Forty-Ninth Street it turned sharply toward Queensboro Plaza to the west, before turning again, this time south, ducking underground once more at the approach to the Hunter’s Point station before burrowing deep underneath the East River and reaching its terminus on Manhattan’s far West Side.
The previous evening had been unusually crisp, and on this June morning I stepped outside into a cold drizzle. I approached the elevated tracks where I observed the preceding station and the coming train which had just departed. I raced up the stairs, swiped my fare card and made it inside seconds before the doors closed. I was immediately transfixed by a woman sitting across from me on an otherwise empty bench. Her copious amounts of dark hair were bound in a lurex tie which triggered a hazy layer of memory from adolescence that as much as I strained to focus, wouldn’t fully emerge. The breaking motion of the train as it slowed between stations cut my reverie short and a few feet before Fortieth Street, it came to a complete halt, interior lights flickering before going dark. In the meantime, the rain had begun to fall in torrents, making a racket on the steel car and cascading through the tracks onto the streets below. When the doors opened at Thirty-Third Street, I was swept into a vortex of high school students which bottlenecked at the stairs, picked up speed upon descent and fishtailed wildly as it hit the street. The deluge ceased as suddenly as it had begun and the wind drove the storm clouds across the river. They hovered silently over Midtown like a bruise. A sticky-sweet fragrance hung in the air as I passed a flowering linden, whose blossoms, whipped by the storm, lay crushed underfoot on the ground.
On the other side of the blue door lies a temple to the discarded. Up front, housewares and electronics, heedless of their own obsolescence, lie worse for wear on dirty shelves – analogue television sets, vintage Polaroid cameras their lenses contused, tangles of companionless adaptors, an old Gameboy, its screen cracked and game cartridges scattered. At the center of the room, rows of plastic bins in a shade of blue replicating the color of the of the front door overflowed with unsorted clothing – men’s, women’s, children’s, small, medium and large, indiscriminate in color or style. Before the dealers and crowds caught on one could spend hours meditatively sorting through the mountains of goods, starting with the picked-over bins at the back while avoiding the mob that congregated at the side door where shoppers every so often came to fisticuffs when the fresh bins were rolled out.
I grabbed a shopping cart and headed toward the back wall sidestepping a boy who sat immersed in play with some toy cars. He ignored his mother who called for him in Spanish. I pulled up alongside a bin and felt a luxurious softness when I reached beneath the surface. A flash of color appeared in my mind’s eye that I could taste in the most profoundly visceral way. It resembled the shade of malted milk, and in my hand, I felt the spongy resistance of the thickly cabled cashmere it was made of. I shut my eyes and inhaled its faintly animal scent, but I sensed something else, something hard to place – which also lingered. The smells and textures and the white noise of activity that echoed off the walls swept in visions which passed in front of me, welling up through the blurred edges of my consciousness. At times they’re accompanied by sounds – of a phone ringing or faraway music or voices. I can perceive the intensity of a person’s pain or happiness and the emotionality of the conveyance would exhaust me.
Soon, a form began to emerge. A woman, perhaps seventy, thin and frail, lay in a hospital bed connected to catheters, and across from her, a man of a similar age leaned forward in a chair, elbows propped on thighs, face in hands. A loud whisper announced a name – Diana – and I saw synesthetic fog of pale green rise toward the ceiling as if it were a substantiation of her essence. I intuited that the man, in his grief, after having kept a keepsake or two, had unburdened himself of the rest of her belongings in an urgent search for closure. I carefully placed the sweater in my cart and moved on.
At the next bin, I sorted through piles of menswear that my own father might have worn decades ago: somber, plaid raincoats with removable plush linings and hand-stitched satin tags bearing the names of the men’s stores that once lined the main streets of Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo, smarting with the palpable sense of decay that those once vital cities evoked. For those of us raised amid their demise remained the ever-present fog of the past and its eternal imprint – one still choked on the sour taste of it. In the crumpled piles of Houndstooth-patterned sports jackets lingered the specter of the two-pack-a-day odor that trailed my father throughout the house and the smoke that seeped from beneath the basement door whenever he sat alone in the dark, blissfully wreathed in the sounds of his record collection: Revolver, Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, and less frequently, the piano pieces of Satie or Debussy or Messiaen – his taste in music belying his outwardly conservative mien.
I rummaged through graphic tees and company-issued work shirts in navy and red, corporate logos on the back and the first names of the working men who wore them embroidered in script on the breast pockets. Pushing them aside, I saw a pair of man’s hands gripping a steering wheel against a dimly-lit dashboard, the car’s headlights slicing the darkness on an empty desert highway. I tossed a dirty stuffed animal aside and uncovered a Harris Tweed jacket in perfect condition, save its woven leather buttons, either missing or unwound. I tasted the salt air and the windy desolation of the Hebridean islands of its origin, they being the land of my paternal ancestors, whose diaspora had ostensibly adopted a transient nature due to the concurrence of their utter isolation and convenient proximity to water.
I encountered plenty of near misses in my searches, like an Italian-made pencil skirt, a hole near the hem just too obvious, and next to it, an evening jacket of ivory silk crepe, its satin collar stained with rust. In the left corner of my visual field, I saw a woman wearing the same jacket and exiting what appeared to be a hotel room of considerable opulence. Her bobbed hair gave the appearance of fire and the weight of her despair pressed heavily on me as she closed a rococo style door behind her. Next to the jacket lay a pink cashmere suit stamped with the tag of an obscure French couturier, cut far too narrowly for my athletic build. It was in pristine condition so I bought it anyway and hung it in my closet if only to own it for a while. These were clothes draped, cut and sewn with a certain female prototype in mind: women slender as giraffes who lunched on proverbial dressing-less salads at classic Midtown boîtes, fortifying themselves for shopping and perhaps a matinée. With the naïvité of a teenager, I’d gaze admiringly at them as they promenaded up and down Fifth Avenue from my job on the sales floor at Saks – women well into middle age, though hardly invisible, owing to their impeccable wardrobes and chic coiffures. They’d glide coolly through the lobbies of Bergdorf’s or Saks like they were floating on air, wrapped in the plush thickets of their full-length furs and leaving a tantalizing aura of fragrance in their wake as if to remind you of how very different from you they were. I imagined them with a mix of awe and admiration, likely suffering through their husbands’ indiscretions as my own mother had done as a price for their privilege, and hoped that through their indignities they’d evened the score by indulging in a few dalliances of their own. Now they’re vanished along with the automats and Times Square peep palaces, though you may occasionally observe them presently among the thick crowds of Uptown tourists, walking with the help of a cane now, a fading apparition from the past. I walked up to the cashier, paid for the sweater and deposited it in a plastic grocery bag I had brought from home.
According to science, the human body is not a closed dynamic system – the energy it contains cannot be created or destroyed. I believe that the things people leave behind after death are animate in a way one can’t fully understand, but if you paid enough attention, their complexities became apparent. As I stepped outside the rain had passed and across the river the sun set the skyscrapers ablaze like molten stalagmites. Still damp with rain, the sidewalk exhaled a nearly impalpable steam that commingled with the sharp, green scent of petrichor. I luxuriated in the heat of the long walk home.
*Originally published in Passage, Issue #12, Summer 2023
Hell’s Kitchen
Third shift to-do list: mix chocolate chip and butterscotch cookie doughs, bake off twenty-four of each, mix and cut cider and old-fashioned doughnuts, fry twenty-four of each, brownies and oat bars, mix and bake one half tray each, prep and caramelize shallots for line cooks, mix and portion twenty-four apple Gruyere and sage, and lemon, ricotta and poppyseed scones, mix and bake off chocolate espresso muffins, glaze and sugar doughnuts, bake and glaze scones, mix and bake off plain and herb biscuits, clean and ready a transport box for the café’s second location, plate and display the rest front of house, wash and store utensils, dishes and baking trays, wipe and sanitize counters, mixers and equipment, sweep and mop floors, take out garbage and recycling, turn off oven, fryer and lights, clock out before front of house personnel arrive. Engage security system. Grab bike, walk outside, bolt door.
The cold hit me like a brick. I jumped on my bike and wove cautiously around the sidewalk stragglers, pumping the break all the while in order to avoid another wipeout on the black ice. At this hour, the weekend traffic was predictably sparse unless you counted the frat boys stumbling out of the bars, idling their cars, windows open and music blaring, ready to cruise down East Wash like it was Melrose Boulevard. Snow began to fall as I coasted downhill, and a fierce wind whipped the delicate flakes into swirling currents across the pavement. I reached the corner, paused momentarily to check for oncoming traffic, and blew through the red light.
The sweat on my forehead evaporated as I released the break and picked up speed. As I got farther from the center of town the street lights became scarce and I found comfort in the dark solitude. Turning onto East Wilson, the road leveled off, and I veered into the left lane and pulled up to the light beside a beat up white pickup that reeked of marijuana.
When the light finally changed, I let the driver turn in front of me, and racing across South Blair, I cut sharply onto the bike path, which was laid out exactly parallel to the railroad tracks that ran through the center of town. During the day, the trains crawled cautiously over the tracks and if you were going at a decent clip, you could ride side by side with the Wisconsin & Southern, horns blaring and bells ringing, starting downtown all the way to South Baldwin.
The snow melted instantaneously as it hit the streets, but on the empty, tree-shrouded stretches of the bike path it settled into a blanket of powdery, phosphorescent white. I couldn’t tell where the asphalt met the grass and intermittently slipped off the path’s raised edges. Through the winter stillness I could hear the sound of my own rhythmic breathing as it kept time with the tik, tik, tik of my bike chain and the faint howling of coyotes far off in the distance.
I’d arrived in the Midwest the previous year, after nearly a lifetime in a freelance film production job on the East Coast that over the course of a year had effectively crashed. Defeated and longing for a fresh start, I reached out to an elderly aunt who agreed to let me crash in her tiny bungalow, which I reasoned was within a compromising distance from both coasts. I convinced myself things would get better – in a year I’d be on my feet again and move back to New York – that this was just a brief detour on the unpredictable trajectory of life. Encouragingly, I scored a pastry job at a fine dining restaurant where I’d initially thrived, but after a few months I became impatient with the pretentiousness, the mind-numbing repetitiveness, and a salary that left me wanting. I moved on.
The way I saw it, the restaurant employees in this town essentially worked for weed money. Hidden behind the gaping duplicity of the network cooking shows, exploitation ran unchecked in the industry, and to soften the blow, so did drug and alcohol use. High on Adderall and moonlighting as death metal guitarists, slicing, dicing, chopping and frying, they worked without complaint at the hand they had been dealt, and upon returning home late at night, took the edge off with a nice, thick spliff and a couple of beers. They’d start off at one place, a few months later move to a restaurant down the block, and a few months after that resurface at the food co-op across the street because it promised health insurance – forever searching for the one good job that could provide some stability and an end to the continuum of revolving doors.
As I slipped into a similar pattern, I began to feel suffocated by an intensely visceral feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world. I had always lived near large bodies of water, the very estuaries of the Atlantic being steps from my Midtown apartment, with weekends in Paris or London just a plane ride away. Though I had never been a stranger to feelings of alienation, it became a constant companion, exacerbating my anxiety to the breaking point. My once infrequent panic attacks became bi-weekly events, leaving me feeling raw and vulnerable against forces I felt were beyond my control. My only refuge – it didn’t matter the weather – was to lose myself traversing the prodigious network of bike paths that crisscrossed the town’s environs.
There were a few moments of clarity: something as random as say, an errant thread, or a number on a scrap of newsprint at the bottom of a box of produce could bring an unexpected connection to someone thousands of miles away. I thought of the millions of migrant workers who gathered the harvest each season, and marveled at how a piece of their lives, by mere happenstance, had found its way into my hands. I had once driven past these workers toiling under the unrelenting sun of the San Joachin Valley as a passenger in an air-conditioned SUV, feeling both heartbreak and shame. This microcosm of laborers – pickers, porters, drivers, dishwashers and cooks – made up the invisible army of servants that populated this country and fed its masses. I had fallen into their ranks.
The bike path opened to the sky again and the power plant came into view, its hulking shadow leering ominously. A few blocks farther down, the city buses had started their routes, filing clumsily out of the garage on East Main, spewing fumes of grimy exhaust that trailed their elephantine frames. Just past the deserted skate park, the path merged again with the street, where the snow had already melted and formed slush puddles near the curb. The wind became even more intense now, and large flakes of wet snow flew almost horizontally into my face and eyes, blurring my vision. I lowered my head so that my visor would intercept them, every few seconds glancing ahead of me to avoid crashing.
As I cut through the residential neighborhoods, the picture book houses were still hushed with sleep, and the spent embers of woodsmoke from their fireplaces scented the frozen air. Christmas lights and the odd menorah decorated the windows, diffusing their radiant colors upon the snow. Announced by the sound of the air whistling through their wings, a vee of tundra swans suddenly entered my eyeline, soaring toward the frozen lakes to the south, their underbellies lit by the flare of city lights below. I glided past the street maples, their fractal-ed branches already heavily laden with snow, and then a cedar house, like a dacha straight out of a Tarkovsky film came into view, its windows glowing with a seductive warmth, as if gaslit within. Though pulsing with life, I had never seen a soul in or around it, but as I rode past, I noticed that a fir wreath strung with tiny white lights had recently been affixed to the front door.
By this time I was soaked with sweat underneath my ski jacket, while my fingers and toes had begun to sting from the cold and the wind generated by the speed of my bike. The snow suddenly stopped falling as I turned off the bike path, and rising high above the treetops I saw Venus, the morning star, shimmering brightly against a sky so cold and crisp and clear it seemed it would shatter.
I rolled up the driveway, wheeled my bike into the garage and bounded up the few steps to the back door. I fished the house keys out of my bag and unbolted both locks. Silently easing my way into the kitchen, I lit the gas burner and boiled water for tea. The clock on the stove read 6:11, which somehow felt reassuring. I hung my jacket on a chair to dry and sat down at the kitchen table, and the acrid smell of the shallots I had caramelized hours before wafted upward like steam and assaulted my nostrils. Outside the kitchen window a roseate light crept up in anticipation of the rising sun and made an absurd contrast with the darkly silhouetted homes as in L’empire des Lumieres, the series of paintings by Rene Magritte that I vividly recalled from a worn second hand coffee table book I’d once owned and after many moves later, finally lost track of.
I poured boiling water over the tea bag and let it over-steep. I stirred in milk distractedly and removed the spoon from the mug, hypnotized by the refractions of the overhead light in the swirling liquid. At that moment I had a vision that in a few short hours Venus would begin her ascent over those same field workers that I’d seen as a passenger on that California highway as they descended from a van to begin their day. In my mind’s narrative, they were carrying paper cups or perhaps thermoses of hot coffee and I wondered what they had packed for lunch. I thought of the invisible thread between them and myself, both in the sky and on the Earth below and it renewed my faith in life. I finished my tea, rinsed out the mug, and placed it in the dish rack. Walking down the hall to the bathroom, I peeled off my work clothes and threw them in the hamper. I turned on the shower, stepped into the tub and closed my eyes as the warm water ran down my face.
*Originally published in 86Logic, Issue #4, May, 2021
Phantom
It’s early morning and the artisanal coffee on which I’ve recently splurged combined with the blinding sunlight are making me hallucinate. I know that sounds weird, but a single cup of coffee can do that to me. Maybe I need to knock off the qigong. Anyway, I’m watching the sweet potato latkes on my breakfast plate breathe. They rise and fall, rise and fall, gasping for air like two fish out of water. Suddenly, I hear three caws from a crow as it flies south and its shadow disappears from the window. Caw! Caw! Caw! I hear with my normal hearing, but Abattoir! Abattoir! Abattoir! is what I hear inside my head which is also where I hear the text alert notification sounds at night whenever I’m being sent some kind of cosmic warning from who knows whom or what. Ding! Ding! Ding! Sometimes I have to ask it to stop or I can’t sleep through the night. The voices, too. Whoever sends them obviously has no perception of time, but apparently time is a construct that doesn’t actually exist. Even physicists believe that. So, my bad. You might also ask why sounds come in threes. Next, I put down my fork and walk toward the window, thinking the crow had been sitting on the outside ledge, but there’s really not much of a ledge out there on which to sit. When I happen to glance up at the sun, it’s being halved horizontally by the telephone wire that lines the street, and that is where the crow had to have been perched in order for its shadow to have been projected smack dab in the middle of my living room window. As strange an experience as when you find yourself underneath the shadow of a passing airplane but you don’t live anywhere near an airport. And once, reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival (aloud) because as an actor this is my habit, a crow, possibly the same one (there’s a murder of five or six of them who live in the neighborhood), let out a blood-curdling shriek outside my window at the exact moment I uttered the lines:
feathers from a crow
that screams
from the furnace
Now, don’t tell me all this is a coincidence, my relationship with crows (not to mention geese, robins, jays and cardinals). And furthermore, I made a recent appeal to the ancestors (no particular ones) for assistance with dreamtime knowledge. I also ordered a book on the subject online and I immediately felt its power rattle my kitchen as I opened the box in which it arrived – not because a stack of bound paper has any intrinsic power, of course, but because the power of one’s intentions which have been projected upon it does. Intent = manifestation of desires. Not to be confused with magical thinking which, IMHO just unhinges people even further, and in a sanitized form is fraudulently promoted by popular talk show hosts who are completely full of shit. Oddly, I’ve never considered a tattoo before, but three artfully arranged crows in mid-flight sound intriguing as a dermal talisman of sorts. From the chair in which I’m sitting I can see them shadowed against a brightly lit window.
*Originally published in Leon Literary Review, Issue #9, July 2021,
https://leonliteraryreview.com/2021/07/helene-macaulay-phantom/
Me and Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields and I keep running into each other. I, of course, am aware of this but she isn’t. That’s the problem with only one of us being famous. When I was a teenager, I boiled with envy the first time I saw her in a Vogue fashion spread. Next came a trillion covers, then the infamous Calvin Klein jeans commercial. “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvin’s?” That one’s gotta be a mess, I thought, perched on my Ethan Allen-framed twin bed and calico quilted polyester bedspread, obsessively leafing through photos of her and Andy Warhol at Studio 54.
When I turned eighteen, I moved to New York City and through an incredible stroke of luck I found myself working as a “model” on the same L’Oreal presentation as Brooke. She was the star, of course – I was just filler. It was me, about twenty other girls and Brooke. None of us could possibly have held a candle to her. She had a better face, hair and body than all of us combined. I thought, now there’s a world-class beauty. She was also really nice. Bitch. Afterward, I caught the R train back to Bay Ridge feeling like a total loser.
A couple of years later, I was working at a fancy pharmacy on Madison Avenue and Brooke stopped in one day. All the famous celebrities like Cher and Joan Collins shopped there. Well, it was the eighties. In fact, one morning, Johnny Carson came in really early, ostensibly to avoid the crowds, but when he saw that he was the only customer in the store, he did one quick turn around the place and he was out the front door again. Didn’t buy a thing. And since we’re talking about Joan Collins, a couple of decades later, when I was makeup artist to the rich and famous, I worked with her on a Harper's Bazaar shoot commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the TV soap, Dynasty, of which, she, of course, was a star. Well, I really worked with Linda Evans, but Joan was there. Anyway, one of the photos featured Joan and Linda engaged in a kind of pencil-skirted, stiletto-heeled tug-o-war with a Louis Vuitton bag on the fifth floor corridor of the Plaza Athénée. Even Neil Lane, the jeweler was there, with his big, fancy diamond rings. He was really nice. And Linda Evans was really nice. And Joan Collins was, well, Joan Collins. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Anyhoo, back to Brooke. Crazy thing was, I had a whole conversation with her about hairbrushes because that was what she had stopped into the pharmacy to purchase, and mission accomplished, I sent her home happily clutching a mini Mason Pearson. Oddly, I didn’t even recognize her until the end of the transaction, I guess because you just don’t expect these people to be strolling around and also because she was wearing a pair of sunglasses that covered half her face. As she left, I was like, damn, that girl is gorgeous. Then the owner of the store walked up to me and said, “that was Brooke Shields”, like I was stupid or something. “Uh-huh”, I said, looking down my nose at him, pretending not to give a fuck.
Later, still in my makeup artist to the stars phase, I scored a job on one of those morning TV chat fests. I was hired to do makeup for one of the hosts, and one day Brooke was a guest. I was also kind of famous myself in those days in a viral internet video kind of way (don’t ask), and to my surprise, Brooke emerged from her dressing room that morning and said “hi” to me while I was chatting with one of the producers in the corridor. I mean, she said it like, “hi-i-i-i-i-i-i!!!” like she was really excited to see me. But because I’m an asshole, I just said “hi” wondering why she had said “hi” and then went right back to talking to the producer. Later I had to remind myself that I was kind of famous.
That’s the way it always was – I could never really wrap my head around why people sometimes smiled at me on the subway, or why once a fireman screamed my name out the window of a passing fire truck as I was walking down 5th Avenue. I always had to slap my forehead and say, “oh, right – I’m famous!” That’s probably because I’m an Aquarius. So it might have seemed like I was rude to her, but I just couldn’t fathom why the Brooke Shields would want to talk to me, and I’ve been consumed with guilt about it ever since. But not as bad as the guilt I’d suffered the time I burnt the toupee of a legendary old-school crooner who will remain nameless, because, frankly, who needs a lawsuit? I mean, let’s face it – they all wear wigs. And how was I supposed to know it was synthetic hair? Anyway, I’d just once like to sit down with Brooke for a cocktail, or heck, even a coffee so we girls can have a chat. Oh, and Brooke, if you’re out there and you see this – HOLLA!!!
*Originally published in "Grattan Street Press: Intermissions", November, 2021