Jumbled in the Mind
Over the last week or so, a picture cohered of a woman processing her frustrations.
Over the last week or so I watched a little of the new Ripley series, stopped watching, started again, stopped again. I wasn’t against it. I liked parts of it and liked other parts of it a little better. But I wasn’t pushed through it. The experience had no motive force. Over the last week or so I also read a piece of an old story I wrote about going to a party with an older friend who was trying to impress his wife while simultaneously apologizing for what he perceived to be a lifetime of neglect. That story, too, had no motive force, but there were some things in it that buzzed in my brain. And I also heard a snippet of a conversation which was either about Natalie Wood’s death or Thomas H. Ince’s death, both of which occurred on or near boats. Those things were powder, kept dry, and then came the trigger this morning, which took the form of a guy walking ahead of me on the street, talking on the phone. He was shortish, of indeterminate age, in decent shape, very tan, with a short-sleeved collared shirt, khaki shorts, and shoes that looked like and probably were Courser, very pricey. I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying but it sounded like he was barking orders at someone about a party. Whose party? A spark went up from him and ignited all those other things which had entered the earlier part of my week (and the earlier part of this paragraph). I had my computer with me so I ducked into a coffee shop and tried to make a story of it all, which isn’t the same as trying to make sense of it all. It’s below.
Oh, I should also mention that I have been reading an unpublished manuscript by a guy I don’t know very well, have in fact only recently met, and there are some things about it that I really like and find inspiring, which almost never happens. He’s determined to be out there on the edge, placing the process of meaning-making and art-contacting before almost anything else. I am not sure what kind of book this will end up being, whether it’s philosophy or lyric memoir or a very syntactically elaborate form of poetry, but it’s been sticking to the ribs of my brain, to botch a metaphor. Anyway, doesn’t matter since it’s not published yet, but I just wanted to respond to its energy with some back-at-ya energy.
Okay, here’s the story. The title, of course, is from Prince’s “1999,” and is about the surprise of recognizing that your revelry won’t forestall sadness or death or anything else.
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OOPS OUT OF TIME!
In the canyons of Manhattan lived a man named Davis Burk, “a titan of marketing,” the papers liked to say. Though he was a little short for a titan, he had the funds to compensate, and in fact he had been the one to first suggest the nickname. His wife Leslie, a Southern belle gone northern (computer science at Carnegie Mellon, where she streamlined some major problems in data science working with Jeannette Wing), was perched on the edge of forty. Davis came home one day and swept her off her feet with a pair of words: “St. Barts,” he said. He had planned a trip and a party. The kids would stay at home. Fifteen of their closest friends would not. It was to be a monumental exercise of expensive decadence. Leslie smiled. She raised her eyebrows like she was getting ready to lead Davis to the bedroom, though they both knew what that really meant, which was wine and a movie, both of would be were to both of their liking (red, mystery). The movie was an 1951 noir, Danger Zone, low budget, brought in from the wilds of an obscure streamer. During the opening credits, Leslie went to the bathroom and took what she called “a small jazz combo” of pills. She stared at herself in the mirror until she was aroused, then angry, then content with what she saw, and then she went back to the movie. “She asked him to buy a saxophone case at a yacht club auction,” Davis said. “That’s your strangest sentence yet,” Leslie said, and then she said “Whoop de doo,” and then she thanked him for the trip and a party right there on the couch, the flick still flickering. After Danger Zone she stayed on the couch while Davis went to sleep and made a guest list for the party. She wrote down Heather first, not because she liked her—she despised her—but because Heather was central. She was the girlfriend of Davis’s closest friend Roger. Heather was a flirt and a fool. But she was instrumental in holding down the flapping cloth that was Roger. Roger and Davis went all the way back to college, which was when Leslie had met them both. They had run together as friends for a little while, and even named their clique: the Clutch, after a popular New Wave group. Davis had come up with the name, a marketer even then. “We have no band,” he said, “but we are a band.” Six months into their friendship, at a New Year’s party, there had been a dramatic moment when Leslie had to choose which man to take home. She had kissed them both. Both had reciprocated. After further consideration, she had chosen Davis, sensing his devotion to prosperity. By the next week they were an item, and the Clutch began to recede into history. Even so, Roger had stayed on her mind. The year after that, he had started to date a woman named Demetria, and the four of them had taken a couples’ vacation in the Adirondacks. One morning, Leslie had seen Roger sitting on the porch, putting the tips of his fingers to his templa as if her was in pain. She had felt his loneliness like a current going through her, and the sensation had remained lodged in her mind for years. Demetria, come and gone, Joan, too, and Genie and Padmalochana and Grace. Leslie endured them all stoically, but the night she met Heather, at a costume party (Leslie: Ada Lovelace, Heather: Clara Bow), she had cried herself to sleep, not fully knowing why. “Must be to think I,” she wrote in her diary, using a kind of code that she believed shielded her from comprehension, “she the bow is on the hull of the boat for full fix.” Two years on from that terrible shock, Leslie and Davis walked down the stairs from the plane that Davis had chartered and stepped on to the St. Barts tarmac. They were greeted by a group of friends: Olivia, Nancy, Ruth, Calliope, John, Jim, Jasper. “Where’s Heather?” Leslie asked, meaning Roger. She was told that Heather was at the hotel, acting as a nurse to her husband, who had been struck down by a tropical malady. “Poor guy,” said Davis. Leslie nodded mutely. That night, Leslie gave herself to the party as much as possible. Champagne took the form of exuberance and vice versa. Roger was still sick, but Heather showed around ten. Her benevolence had limits. At two in the morning, bombed like Issaqueena (Leslie’s joke to herself—her grandfather had flown B-25 Mitchells in the war, and trained over near Calhoun), Heather stood mostly topless on the dance floor shrieking the names of the members of Duran Duran. Leslie turned forty at ten past three. Back in the hotel room, the sun starting to rise, Davis helped Leslie out of her skirt. “Honey,” he said, “did you like your party?” Leslie could not speak so she rolled up on him instead. He laughed and said her name the way she liked to hear it, a sibilant s, a lovely man. Twenty minutes later, Leslie cursed every single one of the forty years that she had been on the earth. What was happening elsewhere in the hotel? Heather, probably still tanked, was probably staggering up to her room. Roger, probably still sick, was probably still awake. Or maybe Roger was asleep, dreaming of Leslie, and Heather had fallen face-first into the ocean where she would be cruelly halved by a sawfish. Leslie smiled. Can be to hope I, she thought to herself, time to come the accident it will. [©2024 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]