Nocturnes

When Peter Pan goes wrong.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0500

When Peter Pan goes wrong.

Once Upon a Type

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0500

I knew that I had grown up when I finally stopped dreaming about you.

When I was a kid my parents had tried telling me that you weren’t real. They even took me to a therapist to have my head shrinked, but he only gave me some candy to nibble on and chucked me under the chin — “Only one at bedtime sweetheart, but keep that fairy dust in your eyes or you’ll become an old sucker just like me.”

But I knew even then that you were real. And once when I was 13 you even proved it to me so that I had to wear a turtleneck to school for a whole week.

But then you came by less and less. “Love you Wendy,” a stray foot doing a dance of epilepsy against the window’s edge. “See you real soon.”

And then you didn’t come at all.

Until that final time. I knew it was you when I heard the sling shot of a pebble and the outline of your frame — its echo — against my windowpane. I let you in. I always did, even when I sighed and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, fumbling for the pill box with the sewing thimble that I kept under my pillow just in case that damn shadow of yours decided to show up.

You laughed and your laugh was different. “Oh Wendy, that dark side of mine won’t be bothering us anymore. I ditched him awhile back — he was nothing but trouble for me.”

Peter, how beautiful you had once been. Even on my fifteenth birthday when you took me to my first goth night at Neverland and left me to dance with that tweaked out Twinkie fairy bitch I had understood. We both liked how you glistened iridescently with his dust. That with just one sprinkle you would turn you into the magic boy, offering up parlor tricks for a dollar. I watched you levitate spoons, throw cards on tabletops in bold wager. And then, into my lap, where they became spades. Your pockets sang with the steal of gold coins, the sweat of my palms.

I couldn’t see you but I knew that this time you weren’t pacing, already suffocating in my bedroom with one ear cocked for the siren call of a lost boy’s transmission as he circled my block, waiting for you. I knew that this time it was really bad.

“Peter, uh, how are you?…Are you okay? Are you… hooked again?”

We both knew what that meant — butterfly-fine brows would knit tightly together to make a point, punctuated by the crack of a beloved doll’s twisting neck.

Instead you just smiled. Really smiled.

“Wendy, the Captain’s out of commission. Cleaned up his act real good. He and my dad are actually tight now. They even got me this sweet deal in Williamsburg for a loft space. I have to share it with my brothers, but hey, it’s only until college —”

“Dad? You don’t have a dad, Peter Lost! Your mom and dad were like Bonnie and Clyde and they both died in some murder-suicide thing at the Chelsea Hotel when you were a kid! I tried to tell my parents so that they would adopt you and you could stay here with me but you well, you remember how that went; after that I was gone for a long time. Well, you know, you remember —”

You turned on the lamp, drowning out the nightlight that had once commanded battalions of puppet shadows across your face late into the night while you popped my candy and told bedtime stories. The light healed the purple bruises under your eyelids and tamed the dancing onyx of your eyes into a puppy-dog amber. Your cheeks had filled into two symmetrical stains of rose.

‘Uh, Wendy, how long are you planning on staying your parents for?”

“What do you mean, Peter? I live here. I’ve always lived here — except for when I haven’t (giggle) but there really hasn’t been a trip away since the last time I saw you.”

“Oh Wendy, I am so truly sorry.”

You took me into your arms. I searched furtively for the concave of your ribcage but you didn’t break the embrace and anyway, it was no longer there.

“Don’t cry, Wendy, I’m going to help you. You’re so beautiful.”

“Oh Peter, you have gone truly mad!” I threw the window open, ready to walk the plank if I had to in order to dive into the whole, wide world. The wind was confetti rich with fairy dust.

“Love you Peter. See you real soon.”

And just like that, I was gone.

Sketching in Crayon

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:30:00 -0400

A model gets on the 4 train at 59th. Her feet are flat plains in shoes that don’t give an inch, her hair is pulled from off her face into an effortless chignon. She flips through her portfolio, chewing a finger eagerly as she takes in the show — the nymphet, the siren, the sun-streaked smile of Abercrombie & Fitch.

Three white women in their mid-20s shift their weight back and forth on tan pumps. They wear dark moles on pasty arms and sensible knee length skirts. On Wednesdays they have manicures with sheer nail polish done by interchangeable Asian women who cut the cuticles too close at the cue of a ringing purse.

The Asian women greet them politely but can’t remember their names; they all leave the same tip and wear engagement rings without a wedding band.

A sulky faced exotic with black-pea eyes popping out in liquid kohl sits down next to the model. The exotic’s nails are presumably a dark, vampy red.

Out of the corner of their eyes the white women are watching the men watching the exotic study the model as she walks off the train, where all of them then drop out of this story all-together.

Thoughts On Kevin Smith And His Scantily Clad Women

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:28:00 -0400

Thoughts On Kevin Smith And His Scantily Clad Women

I Really Don't Want to Be Known as "That Girl Who Writes About Scantily Clad Women." Honest.

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:18:00 -0400

I Really Don't Want to Be Known as "That Girl Who Writes About Scantily Clad Women." Honest.

Madame X in New York City: A more solitary back-room experience...

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:06:00 -0400

Madame X in New York City: A more solitary back-room experience invites late make-out sessions on a school night.

Madame X - A Bar Review Post-Mortem

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:58:00 -0400

“But I just don’t understand why you don’t want to paint me anymore,” wailed Madame X to John Singer Sargent.

“You are no longer new,” Sargent replied, as matter of fact as a brush stroke. “I told you to stop with the slip of your dress strap. That alabaster shoulder, Amelie, was everything.”

“You weren’t the only one who wanted me. I am…I am the It-Girl!”

“Mrs. Gautreau. Amelie. Your face is as pale as your arms are plump. You are no longer twenty-three if you ever were a day. And you eat — red meat.”

Madame X looked around one last time at the fading red couches of her once famed boudoir, arching an alopecia-thinned brow at the imprint of a spectral lover (John - Jacques - Jonathan — and Catherine) who had lingered on the pale neck before leading Madame’s frail hand out to the garden to smoke French Resistance cigarettes and talk of all the fine things in the world.

“You can have the place if you still want it,” said Singer Sargent. ” But you should reconsider those portraits —they’re just so obvious, although the one in the unitard who looks like a yogi may do. You may also want to consider adding a few organic wines, and maybe a starter salad, if you even want to try and attract new clientele.”

Starter salads? Rabbit food? Madame grimaced.

“And most importantly, the smoke is bothering the neighbors.”

Madame X didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t except to kiss Singer Sargent tenderly on the nape and quietly pull the door shut and the heavy drapery down behind him.

She pulled down her black gown too — slowly tugging at the straps as the artist had first taught her — until her nude body shivered in a full-length gilded mirror.

She had never noticed how her paleness — accented by a light amber down — had lacked tautness, elasticity. Her grace had always been in the suggestion of movement rather than in the still-life’s perfection. Even in The Painting the grip of the hand gave the lie to the cool profile as the gaze — straight-ahead — dreamed of raptures in crooked side-streets.

But her clients had never minded. She had not changed.

Madame X took the revolver (it was in the yellow envelope all along in the conservatory) and stroked its muzzle against a belly fragrant with steak and wine.

“Now what would the neighbors think of that picture!”

The old Madame laughed, clucking a Bordeaux-stained tongue to ivory teeth.

“I guess I’ll have to put out an ad in all of those Bridge and Tunnel rags tomorrow,” she said with a bit of her old flounce, opening up the garden doors and striking up a match.

Dusk, drugs and deodorant — who knew the boroughs had it...

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:07:00 -0400

Dusk, drugs and deodorant — who knew the boroughs had it so good?

Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me. Sybil.

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:24:00 -0400

“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.“ - Vladimir Nabokov, The Vane Sisters

A Ghost Story Out of Season

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:20:00 -0400

The house at the end of the world was like a sad wedding cake in lavender stucco, but for years, the ghost whispered, it had reigned over the lavish seaside community, dignified in forest green.

When I first came you singled me out, told me stories. You showed me where you had undressed Marilyn Monroe, who had made love to you in the servants’ entrance because she had wanted to get her elbows dirty.

You had worn fancy clothes that wrinkled almost immediately around your frame. You threw parties. You had been handsome and messy before people knew that handsome and messy were fashionable. Your lips, like my father’s, would have tasted of tobacco.

When the other man died the procession of SUVs rounded the driveway like a funeral dirge. “Are they finally coming to say goodbye to me?” You laughed, and I could almost make out the wry, undercurl of your lip.

I didn’t have the heart to tell you that no, it was for someone else, someone who didn’t mean nearly what you do to me.

But you knew that anyway. You always did.

They say that the widow Anne is still a beautiful woman and that her daughter Katharine is equally ugly. Mother, with what they call the classic if not quite ageless face; daughter, blooming features held captive by X disease in utero, the photonegative. Side by side they stand lithe and squat, chiseled and receding, hipbones and baby fat coming forth to meet the mourners —

—The dummies to my ventriloquist.

The middle-aged men are already flirting with the ugly daughter’s pretty friends as their wives speak with Anne, who, already itching her way out of mourning, tells them:

“At least Richard passed in his sleep. Did you know that back in the 50’s a semi-famous writer lived here? One night he threw a party and left the door open for the guests to find him. And they found him — hanging. Right there.”

She points to the servants’ staircase where ingénues had stepped down one by one like silent stars with white, trembling faces and lips like crescent moons. Faces pale but with the knowledge of how to camouflage into the darkness of whatever alcove, attic, closet — and finally, to disappear.

Anne found your instruments pretty soon after they had bought the house. She didn’t know how to play so she used your baby grand as an altar for her photos: Anne, young and not as beautiful with the dead husband, Katharine at a good angle in glamour shot makeup, plaintively ugly again in her first communion.

Each face is embalmed in white lacquer and gazes out from behind clear glass for the Viewing. People in party dresses come to pay respects while idling away on lost music notes. The symphony, always there, passing.

That night we run around the house like mad to finally play with all of your instruments, to caress the servants with faces white, like silent stars.

Mother served blueberry pancakes in the early morning and then we played ping-pong on the lawn because it was cool but felt like spring. Mother soon rushed us back inside the house because it was spring but felt cool.

I am standing back because my leaving will lock you back up inside Friday night wakes– the catches inside hollow throats — smiles frozen in mine and my mother’s pictures.

I go back to sleep instead. It was, as you know, the only way to find you.

Hey "Lost," I Think I'm Breaking Up With You

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:49:00 -0400

Your season by season episode guide and thinly veiled allegory all in one:

Season 1 - Spring:

He was the crazy transfer student who materialized out of nowhere and before you knew it the two of you were playing hooky and taking long walks on the beach. He hit you like a train (or even plane — ahem) wreck, except that it felt kinda good.

And then it got better. In fact, you just danced around the idea of sex and didn’t really notice when it never happened because so much other stuff was going down. There were scavenger hunts in the woods, and rumor had it that he even had a pet polar bear.

You had no idea who he really was or where this whole crazy thing was going, but, well, what did it matter when there was an underlying sense of a transcendent force driving everything? You may not understand all of his mysteries but you sensed that he was leading you somewhere grand.

If you were one of those other girls you may even say that things seemed, well, rather fated.

Season 2 -

Summer envelopes you in its supernatural haze. You are spending every week together now, climbing trees and chasing rabbit holes. He introduces you to philosopher kings and an incestuous crowd where everyone goes way, way back. And they move so fast that you can’t keep track of whose coming and going.

But somehow when you feel that first, mid-August chill you almost admit to yourself that — as fucked up as that beach scene is — the view is starting to feel a little bit mundane.

Season 3 - Fall:

You thought you’d realize you were crazy for doubting but then you see him that first day of school and wonder how you never noticed his mullet and spray-on tan before. The two of you had it so good together though that you’re willing to try absolutely anything to keep it going. You even push it so far as to have sex for the first time in a cage (and on video — with Others watching) but somehow that just makes everything that much worse.

Season 4 - Winter:

It’s that holidaze again so you can’t break up, and besides, things almost look the way they once had. Except that they’re not. You’ve cooled down on the coitus to recapture the magic but this time — even though things are just as bizarre as they were at the beginning — you sense that your boy is a sphinx without a secret.

Season 5 - Spring:

He knows that you’re leaving. That you suspect him now of the worst possible crime that he could fathom — that of being boring and meaningless. So he’s going to tell you Everything. (Almost.)

You are surprised, even pleased, by his revelations. They are better than what you had expected, but they come in a burst of climaxes — one may even say flashes — rather than building up the anticipatory momentum that you had felt that first spring.

You finally realize you can have him if you want him. That this story might be going somewhere.

“But it’s just a little too much, too late,” you explain to a friend who thought you had fallen off the radar forever. “And besides, I think this Wednesday night we should go out to a bar, have a few beers and meet some real guys.”

Burlesque! Bombshells!...Bridezillas?

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:31:00 -0400

Burlesque! Bombshells!...Bridezillas?:

I met super star burlesque performer Angie Pontani and wrote about it for chicktellectual.com

No Exit

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:21:00 -0400

I envied the fans’ reverence at a Morrissey concert tonight the way that I once envied my childhood Catholic friends who had me over for Christmas and consumed the body and blood of Jesus Christ on Sundays.

“Daddy, do you believe in God?”

“No, darling.”

“What about heaven?”

“I don’t think there’s a heaven. But we can celebrate Christmas. How about a tree this year?”

“But what happens when we die?”

“Nothing happens, that’s the great thing.”

Crying now.

“Honey, it means you’re free. What you need to do is focus on your life. Now read this play ‘No Exit.’ It’s kind of a fantasy story set in hell. I think you’ll like it.”

It really made no sense that nothing happens when you die but you could still get sent to hell by Sartre and have a bad time of it. I mean, I was 9. Back then my life was a baffling series of long division problems and a bully with freckles.

My dad bought a bible recently. Literary reasons, natch.

Sometimes we still fumble through that old copy of “No Exit” for old time’s sake. We eat spaghetti and sit in stillness, his gaze occasionally arrested on the window, distracted.

I wonder what he sees.

Brooklyn IS the New Manhattan: Restaurant Specials for the Recessionally Minded

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:08:00 -0400

Brooklyn IS the New Manhattan: Restaurant Specials for the Recessionally Minded

Receeding

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:56:00 -0400

There is nothing like a really bad recession to give one a sense of bona fide entitlement.

Lunch hour, midtown: Anthropologie makes no concession to recession. Women cluster in midwestern corsages, idling in home decor for an aromatherapeutic infusion before plucking gingham dresses to lift to lilting frames. It’s Little House on the Prairie couture with a slightly higher thread count, except that Laura Ingalls would have had to sell the farm to wear one of these frocks.

“But it’s only 148 dollars.” M’s breath scratches on the ‘8’ note, textured like the all-natural, sub-prime soap suds she just foreclosed on in bathwear.

I’m different, difficult. I want my Recession Specials: Indefinite restaurant week at Sardis (although I have never been to Sardis and am not sure if I would even like it), an UWS apartment with two months free - and pets (they already wait in the apartment for me, tails wagging and housebroken), and an eternity in Calvin Klein whites.

If Rogaine were smart they would even start packaging recession specials for the receeding.

I eat my recession lunch special instead. The grape jelly, I believe, was at least marked down by at least 10%.

Playing on the dangling marvel of recession-proof earrings.

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:13:00 -0400

Playing on the dangling marvel of recession-proof earrings.

98.6

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:30:00 -0400

Fever fits me like a favorite, worn-in blanket. Normally my body temperature rests at one and a quarter/ one half degrees below normal (in inverse proportion to my height, which alternately slouches and stands at 5’6” 1/4/1/2) so that a spring breeze can chill my naturally good temper and a sheet at night becomes my best ally in the full thickness of a summer heat wave.

The sickness is not named for the first couple of hours where it sets up house in the nasal cavity, now arrested on a neural passageway, rounding the corner to the left eye alone where it threatens to petrify my gaze into Cyclopean ill-will. I take no notice though — for now I am just looking around, ready to seal the deal with that perfect, jaunty wink.

The onset of the sickness is a manic depressive’s balancing act, elatedly exhausted. A down jacket billows around my waist on a 30 degree winter day - pinafore-like - with each strut-swagger of my hips.

I look at boys who are looking back through curtained eyes soaked with fever.

If the movie is bad I can close my eyes and sink into a titillating montage of dreams. If the post-cinematic coddling at the cafe is worse then I will just cradle my chin and wineglass until my head rests unbecomingly on a zebra-patterned table.

I am the sick girl, after all, and allowances have to be made for the sick.

“…It’s ok; she’s just feeling sick…” “She is not well…” “She is just resting….”

And there is no awkwardness at all until the conversation trickles by incoherently with its dull coherence and a childhood dog is reanimated by just two hairline fractures on the ceiling.

The boys are not looking back now. Only the waiter, each of us mildly terrified.

7th Grade

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:17:00 -0400

…the lost year, the broken year, the dead zone — an endless expanse of fake grass at Tavern on the Green and a round of croquet with the one other “poor” kid who holds the spiked, pink drink for me. We stagger upwards towards the holding line in a game of bourgeoise red rover…

A Thought on Dating

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:11:00 -0400

The Meal as a centerpiece to courtship spells recipe for disaster.

Yet that’s how it always begins: a stray streamlet of sauce on chin, crumbs nesting on lap, and ultimately, financial negotiation.

Twitter-twitches and Turrets

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:50:00 -0400

Madness, spiraling upward:

LeonoraHelenaCreeping feeling that I may have a long-winded prose style. Numbers descend rapidly — heart accelerates — approaching less than zero…3 minutes ago from web
LeonoraHelenaI also have nightmares that I have started a Twitter account and begin posting with rabid, ADHD-induced compulsion.7 minutes ago from web
LeonoraHelenaI have nightmares that Twitter and Vampire Weekend have joined forces to rule the world. Wait.9 minutes ago from web

Addendum:

Last night I did have a nightmare. In it, a contest for writers catches my attention: “Best Headline To Win $500!”

No further details, natch. It was a model headline in its own right.

Had the dream expanded, I would have discovered that books were exclusively compliations of Facebook headlines and Twitter twitches.

Word count holds at a freezing 15 above zero, with character plunging fast.