Kisses For A Eulogy

I am full of eulogy this evening. There is a constant narrative in myself that dictates what it sees in the past tense. What has passed, what we thought about it, what seemed to be true at the time that in retrospect seems suspect.

I am full of those moments where you're seeing the world naked for the first time and wondering why you aren't more embarrassed. Those moments where clarity exceeds your years. Where you are seeing what some people take a lifetime to get hammered into their skulls. Where you're hemorrhaging with the voice of experience because it has become too full, too bright, and life has become engorged with vision.

These moments almost always happen with no witness.

They often happen in the middle of stifling heat waves. When the windows are open to catch lazy breezes and an ounce of air where it is sucked deep into waiting lungs. They pile one on top of each other in my San Francisco memories. The place where I was born. Returned to at fifteen with my mother. Like home. Like a homing pigeon come back to where all the messages originate. The dovecote waits for its inmates.

Nineteen years ago I put on my Bessie Smith album during an unusually sultry heat wave. I had lovely windows in my apartment which I had thrown open to full capacity to catch whatever errant chill might roll by. I was wearing my lemon yellow printed organdy 1950's dress which, due to its transparent nature, was made more demure by an old slip. I wasn't legally old enough to drink, and didn't drink much besides, but I had connections. I poured chilled plum wine into a glass. Probably not a wine glass. As Bessie sang the laundry blues I got it. Got life. What had been; what was yet to come. It all made a kind of pattern.

I was enjoying the early scratchy blues on the thick air, all of it blowing through my dress. As was nearly always the case, I lived in the moment, and I lived outside the moment, in a tumultuous tangle. I was keyed in to all the people in the city. I could hear all the dirty living out there. I could feel everything sluggishly easing through my casements and back out again. Like a stage set it wasn't completely real. I was standing part way outside myself. My room mate was out partying.

Our building on 27th avenue was almost next door to a Russian Orthodox church*. Have I mentioned how much I love strict religion for its pageantry?

I was reading (for the hundredth time) E.M. Forster's book "A Room With A View" when something dolores wafted over the printed letters, something I could follow with my blood, something tangible like liquid love. I turned Bessie off with apology. I followed the sound to my windows, already thrown wide open, and found the source of the lament in the side yard of the church next door. There was a procession in progress of priests in tall stiff hats followed by pall bearers carrying a box of dead trailed by mourners. The priests must have been doing the singing but I could feel the spirits of the mourners following the notes like identical hands shaping the air. Slow, deliberately, they took their time, made their song into the dark, as I watched.

Voyeurs are not romantic figures. Nor are they admirable. I intruded into the hot sinking air with my eyes, with my silent strange eyes watching.

Maybe not, though. I felt the spirit of the dead too. I followed it with my other self. The one not trapped in flesh. The one always free enough to see 180 degrees around. That self crawled inside the coffin and laid next to the corpse. That self said "Goodbye person. There is love enough for both the living and the dead. So feel peace."

The music faded. The entourage rounded the corner. I was left with the heat. With the humid earth funneling through the city lights and shimmering against the break of windows. Bessie's wisdom was still circling, resonating in the quiet. What was true before had become suddenly vivid. Technicolor truth.

We all end up in the same place in the end. It doesn't matter how we go. It doesn't matter if it's too early or much anticipated. It's all the same when we exit. The only thing that truly matters is how we acquit ourselves in this moment right now. Not when we know we're about to die but when we think we have the rest of eternity to be an asshole if we want to.

I was nineteen years old.

I was seeing inside the coffin.

I was just emerging from the crushing weight of the impossible cocoon of a dissociative half life.

I was just coming out of insanity with some of my head not lost.

Like waking up on the side of the road and remembering the gravel speeding up your nostrils in the dead of night. Asphalt tar streaking through you like a near-death imprint.

Waking up to wonder how you got to this stretch of road?

Soon I would trade in my sweet pretty shared apartment for life on my own. Life completely free of any unsolicited advice, company, opinions, or reality check. Soon I would be communicating directly with the cockroaches deep into the night while watching the needling in progress out my living room window.

That night lives in my memory like a portal to something so much greater than myself. It has sustained me through many transitions. I took a shred of it with me and stashed it into my private drawer. I'll never know the name of the corpse.

But I'll always send it kisses for a eulogy.




* I found this picture on Uzvards' flickr pages. This is the actual church I'm talking about in this post. From my window I could see the side yard of this large church which is where I saw the procession described. I loved this church but am now asking myself why I never went inside.

Meeting Asimov

Free-falling through time takes practice if you want to avoid crashing smack into your own self as you have been and not change the fabric of your consciousness forever. Fall like a feather rather than a brick.

I've told the story of how I met Isaac Asimov many times. I know it was real, yet these memories are like mind candy- too interesting to have been real, too succulent with detail to stand the acid test of fact checking. The evening stands as one of those strange happy accidents of life that happen only to those completely open to adventure.

I was twenty two and working as a costume designer with my partner Autumn. As it turned out we were less business partners than I thought, but it hardly matters. We all (meaning our posse of fashionable and morally squidgy friends) wanted to go see the latest period gangster flick in San Francisco and (obviously) we all dressed up in our 1930's best evening wear for the matinee.

Included in the party was my ex-boyfriend Michael with whom I had agreed to remain good friends, something I generally don't believe in doing with exes. We broke up because he was afraid that my innocent and unwitting ass was going to fall in love with his heart breaker self. I tried to tell him that for the first time in my life I just wanted to date and have a good time and not worry about where the relationship was going because in my experience men didn't want relationships with me as much as they just wanted to mess with what they perceived as my naive view of the world.

Which has always mystified me. Me: the girl with the scars on her arms, the very dark and twisted sense of humor, and the vast experience with life disappointments and betrayal. I never saw myself in this naive maiden light that others have.

I later came to realize that it was more a question of chastity and man's irrepressible desire to break through it that gives them the satisfying illusion of naivete than actual naivete. I wasn't a virgin when I was twenty two, in case you were wondering. But I had been so underwhelmed by sex the first time that I didn't really see why I should let myself become so vulnerable to another person again for so paltry a temptation as sex. So I wasn't a slut. Men love that until they have it.

Dammit. I'm sounding uncharitable to men and I don't mean to.

I really liked Michael, even though it freaked me out to date a person with the same name as my dad. He was a fencer which accounted for quite a lot of my attraction to him because he wasn't a man of classic good looks. However, he cleaned up nice, had fabulous posture (unlike myself), and there was something wonderfully old fashioned about him. He was chivalrous and I love chivalry in men. It's a lost art: how to show respectful reverence for women without belittling them. Put a man like that in a 1930's suit and you want to go out with them if for no other reason than the pleasure of being treated like a lady.

So a group of us saw a movie in 1930's evening wear. Afterwards we went to the little restaurant near Polk Street that is an old train car. Every city has one, don't they?

You see how Asimov is an afterthought in this free-falling memory?

None of us wanted to go straight home since we were ready for drinks so Michael suggested we go to the club where he sometimes worked that would just be opening up. It was located South of Mission and was that typical modern, clean, industrial space you expected to find in every hip place in the early 90's. We got to go in, in spite of the fact that they were going to be hosting parties from the book fair held earlier in the day. Private parties. But we knew Michael.

See what I mean? He was the kind of guy that could get you in to an exclusive club catering to private book parties.

Our party was alone for a while and Michael cued up some Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong with gins and tonics. It was a lovely lazy late afternoon loll. We glittered in our evening gear. My gown was one I made myself of velveteen and tulle, spiced with beading and clinging to my (then) lovely slim shapely shape. It was my one and only homage to my 1930's heroines and has since burnt to a black melty crisp in our attic fire of 2003. Sometimes I wish I could pull it out of its old trunk and touch it.

As the light outside reluctantly slid into its sheath of evening, people began to populate our exclusive club. An older couple sat down at our table when the rest of the tables were full. A familiar face.

I suppose this is as good a moment as any to say that I have spent a lot of time with fantasy/science fiction books. Happy time that has felt a little like finding my own kind. I was especially fond of Andre Norton novels. I also loved Anne McCaffrey, Mary Stewart, and T. H. White. One author I have not been particularly fond of is Isaac Asimov.

Which is why it was so disconcerting to find him sitting at a table with me over drinks in a club in San Francisco. With his wife. Wearing name tags that said something like "Mr. Smith" or "Dogbert Dogbody" or something equally unlikely. They were incognito. Except that you can't be incognito if you are a well known science fiction author sitting at a table full of ex-nerds. We had such a lovely time talking about ordinary things. They were so pleasant and all of us wore the glow of a famous evening long before we dragged ourselves home.

I know I wrote about the evening shortly after it happened and if I were to sift through my old diaries I might find some good details there that I've since forgotten. But I'm not sure that those details matter. I sat at a table with Isaac Asimov shortly before his death and talked about ordinary things and was enchanted.

Not too long afterwards, my ex-boyfriend would find himself someone important to marry and we would cease to be "friends". He never did break my heart as he feared he would. I can never decide whether I prefer to remain indignant that he was so sure of his masculine charms or whether I should just be glad that some man out there thought of me as being delicate enough to be breakable, a rather novel experience for me.

It really doesn't matter now.

I ended up taking fencing myself and I suspect that if Michael ever knew it he would assume I did so in a fit of love for him.

I am a pacifist in my heart. Yet it cannot be denied that there is a beauty and an elegance to the art of fighting honorably: hand to hand. Fencing allows you to release the warrior in a safe and gorgeous manner. I am not so different from my son after all. I fight, I just expect to do it to the first pink, not to the death. A pacifist warrior. How many of us are there? Where do we fit in?

I am not grace. I seek it.

I wonder who Asimov's widow is voting for this year?

In this cyclical manner I keep thinking, dreaming, and remembering.