When I wasn’t teaching or driving to and from teaching, I was at home. No, not home. An empty woman in a house. I’d sit in my living room alone grading student papers and stare out the large window onto the street. There were always more papers. I could picture a forever like this. Thoughtless and small and requiring me only to perform tasks with a pen. I’d drink only enough to not feel. Every day. About a bottle a day, roughly. Evenly. Sometimes wine, sometimes vodka. At night I’d watch T.V. until sleep saved me. Or didn’t. This is my life is what I felt. It is slow like still water. There is a dull hum in the ear and a softheadedness best used for napping or making coffee. There is a neighborhood and a house and a refrigerator. The comfort of appliances and going to the gas station. There is a car in which I ride to work and then come home. There is a linear and accessible story to follow. You don’t have to do anything. Or be.
But then there was another woman on the other side of the glass.
Staring numbly out the sanctity of the living room plate glass window one day I saw a woman with ashen skin and dirty blond hair walk by in denim cut-offs and a tube top and cowboy boots. Her arms looked like maps. The circles under her eyes weren’t shiners but could fool you. She had a jerk to her right shoulder every third step or so. Walking by woman. Then I saw an emaciated man in jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt walk after her. He hunched. He had darty eyes. He smoked. His hair hung down in a rat tail to the middle of his back.
The thing is, I’d seen them before. Lots of times. For about two years. She was a hooker. He was her pimp. This was their beat. The alleyway behind my house. We’d been living this way — me on the inside with my ever safening bouge life. Them on the outside with some trace of my past in their skin and hair.
This time when I saw her though, I felt something in my chest that hurt. It felt good to feel something for someone else. Even pain. Maybe especially pain. Sitting there as they went out of view I tasted something warm in my mouth. Then I realized I’d bitten the inside of my cheek.
I didn’t do anything but grade papers, that day. My chest and cheek aching. That night I threw up for no particular reason. Which was not eventful for that time.
But the next time I saw her, something very small and specific caught my eye. An important detail. A bruise at the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t the bruise. It was the bruise that let me see … her eyes, were blue. Like mine. I let the papers I was grading slide to the floor. I watched her walk by and wondered how much she weighed. I wondered her age — impossible to guess. I wondered what jobs she’d tried and failed, this walking woman in cut-offs with dangling maps for arms and a bruise and blue eyes. I tried to picture how much money I had in my wallet in my bookbag by the front door. I watched her ass hanging out of her shorts — it hung limply — two little flesh commas. Then she was around the corner. I waited for her dance partner to come into view. Without thinking I knocked on the window. Without thinking I got up and walked to my front door and opened it and walked outside and walked up to him and said “ How much.”
In the short story I wrote about what happened next I ask her in. I tell her to sit down. She sits down. In the story she smokes and bobbing machines her left knee. Her hand shakes. In the story I say this is what it feels like to be me a woman who teaches English looking down at a woman who sucks dicks all day and all night every night as she sits on my couch smoking. This is what me an addict upwardly mobile given something infinitesimally small to believe in called words thinks looking at her: she looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body. When I see an image of christ I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face.
In the story I say, what do I think I’m going to do, teach her?
People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life — did this really happen to me? The body doesn’t lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn’t it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind’s powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?
An exchange happened. Woman to woman. If she is still alive, she can back me up on this.
Was it possible I had something to give? Out of the nothingness that was my life? Really, what the fuck did I have to give? Woman with too many holes in her. And yet there was something.
Words.
With this woman in me I went to my teaching job and talked to students about ideas. The ideas got into my heart some. And then my heart began to pump. The talking with students about ideas had a pulse. Some of them cared, some of them could care less, but it didn’t matter. I was so happy to get to stand in a room with words and ideas I would have talked to myself alone in a classroom. But I was not alone. I was with what youth should be. I was with artists and writers and scholars and bartenders and musicians and nurses and strippers and lawyers and mothers and some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who’d wronged us and everyone we’d been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.
Whatever it was or was not, there were words. Not just my own. I wrote stories, I wrote books, but the more I wrote the more I saw a door opening behind me, and I saw that if I jammed my motherfucking foot in it, more of us could get through. And that we could make things. Together. What we could make, was art. How that mattered. With other people I made paintings. With other people I made performances. With other people I made stories and readings and strange outsider art events like filling the trees with bras and little raw narratives or unbooting booted cars or hooking up free cable for poor people with a friend who worked for Bell or putting haikus about earthworms and cunts on the windshields of cars in corporate parking lots.
And I wrote my second book of stories.
The book that came out after the death of my marriage was called Liberty’s Excess. If you pick it up, you will recognize the stories. They are the stories of people trying to perform the relationships we’ve been handed as scripts. Daughter. Mother. Husband. Wife. Marriage. They are the stories of women and men who try to love and fail. And fail. And they are the stories of people who live at the margins of this thing we call culture, mostly fucking up, but some of us, aren’t we still here? For the ones who aren’t? I wonder, is it us that fucks up? Or the stories we’ve been given?
It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedoms will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one of your yous. It’s OK though. There are more.
How many times do we die?
Words, like selves, are worth it.