I've always hated staged photographs with phony backdrops, like the ones most suburbanites take their kids to during Christmastime at the local mall. There's nothing fun about some drunk dressed up as a big scary rabbit who wants you, a small child, to sit on his smelly lap. With my basic instincts intact, I moved into my aunt's old apartment (in the Kensington section of Brooklyn), after college to get work as soon as possible, because I have always been the backup plan in my life. There is no "plan b", which is why we (as a family) invested so much in my education. OK: here's time to think. Now: do. Simple.
And it was. I got an entry level job right away with lots of prestige, per the pedigree we just paid for at school. That was the deal. We used "white-bread" RISD for a resumé cred that would get me into big city life, I would give back to the world, and here we are. But with each new level I attained came pitfalls and challenges so severe, I always knew I was the best player on my particular family team. How else to win in the forefront of your technology? There was no other spot for me than the one I took up, with the worst and most severe extremes you could imagine, which is why I write my stories down for all of you to talk about, verify, then act on, because it's all true. Every single word of it.
But not everyone lives an honestly open life, because they don't know how to succeed through trying. My aunt was one of those lazy types. She could do stuff, but she wanted to smoke and drink more than she wanted to think. What can you do? There's only so much therapy and rehab you can pay for, before you learn to just give up their ghost, which is what most hardened addicts decide to do, especially the smart-mouth arrogant ones. They feel that the "thumbing the nose at life" routine is cool, so that's what they do: make stupid snarky remarks at the local bar, like some brilliant bar-stool philosopher who deliberately chooses to blow their big time career so they can sit around and regale you with their life stories, except without the big life, or will to live. In the end, it's almost always suicide for them.
You keep waiting for a punchline to the joke, or a moral to the story, only to find at the end of their big "onion-peel" routine that there's absolutely nothing at their core; the ultimate jab at all of humanity, by being an utter waste of time. It's evil, petty, and cruel, but so what? If you want to crumple up your life like it's a wadded-up piece of used toilet paper, I guess you can, but who will be there to witness it? Other drunks who testify about your offenses against G-d? Why would a divine presence that can be anywhere at anytime in any century, doing anything, care about your ineptitude? Should we care at all? Of course, we should, but it is something that I still struggle to define for my brilliant but careless family, which is the core of every human problem. What do you do about lazy fuck ups? How far does it go?
I don't know if anyone can answer that for anyone else, except I know that I fight evil wherever it rears its' ugly head, and that it's always there somewhere, either in the background, or as that fat loud drunk spitting right in your face. Ultimately, who gives a fuck about some drunk, but you in that one small moment with them? Is that the best you can do? I don't follow along with the bottom-feeder set, even as I tentatively cross through their barren territories, ones that were strip-mined of their usefulness many years ago, probably by some fat, corrupt, white guy not from my line; someone who treats the earth, the land, and the people around them like it's disposable, just like their life.
And so I looked through the flotsam and jetsam of my aunt's life, just like the pieces of history she left behind too soon for us to sort through, like we were guests at her intergalactic junk sale, which was the highest heights she aspired to. Some of it was intentionally scary, like the old photo she had on one wall of her paid-for Brooklyn apartment, with scary eyes that followed you everywhere, for me to take down and give to some art fag in the city who aspired to decorate the sets of other people's movies; a perfect ending to the fake history she attached to the picture when I asked her about it, like he was my real dead uncle, just so she could have a drunken laugh in my face.
It was silly and bitchy and beer-flavored and...so what? But that's what she was like; in between the bad jokes were real histories that she tossed away just as casually, like all of my war hero grandfathers' medals from WWII that I kept for years as the only family conservator who cared about them, now framed in my father's house after I salvaged and packaged them for him, because at the time, he could've cared less. Every time I moved (and I made several big intercontinental moves funded and fueled by my energy and output solely), I lovingly wrapped his trophies to be carried away with me. Finally, years after my father built another weird extension to his desolate McMansion, in a hollowed-out space with an empty trophy case where we should be, he finally asked me for them, so his housewife could have something to decorate with, and then show guests, at their holiday dinners.
But that's how it was. Some of her trash was obviously treasure, like those sepia-colored photos of people who were clearly family, because my father and his sister were easily recognizable to me in them. I asked them questions about who they were, and sometimes they answered (correctly or not, I don't know), and sometimes they didn't. All I know from this vantage point in the autumn of 2015 is that as a very young woman who was used to running other people's households and lives, even as a twenty-something on a borderline poverty paycheck in publishing, I still had the presence of mind to call my aunt from her abandoned apartment one weekend afternoon, on a phone and line I paid for on my own, black pen in hand, to ask her about each and every old photograph I found.
And so, here it is for you to read: family from long ago, carefully reconstructed through the disordered recollections from a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing drunks, a people who were given the keys to a castle that's deeply engraved in their hearts, never to be collected. On the back of one such photo I inscribed (in carefully legible black handwriting) the story of Shirley Doucette, because I had an immediate feeling of dread just looking at her "bad" Santa photo. That's how intuition works; you learn to trust your gut by honoring your immediate reactions to real life situations, without the beery boozy drunk to talk you out of what you know to be true about life and the world around you. And there, in my neat adult handwriting, is her brief but sad life story that may or may not be true: that at the age of 12, some man ripped her off the street while she was walking home from school, kidnapping and raping her repeatedly, before murdering her like she was worth nothing more than a piece of trash.
I have no idea if it is true, but this is what I have, here and now, in this year that is 2015, and that is this: when I took out those old crumbly sepia-toned photos, ones that my aunt had carelessly discarded like my ancestors' body flung out onto the road after someone evil had finished using her, I saw this image after taking a series of pictures of her and the rest of my clan. It looks like the dark blurry outline of a girl about her age, with a low-set, dark blond, curly ponytail, dressed in her century's garb, encircling her young arms in a hauntingly beautiful embrace from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders, as I stood by the window taking a photo of her old Christmas photo, and this is what I know about it now. I feel nothing but love: a purely simple, honest kind of love, of a kind that endures forever, in every time period for all time, through the ages, in this century and that one, too. This is a forever kind of love.
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| Hello, Shirley. I love you. |
