Jousting With Our Past Selves

I spend a lot of time thinking about identity. My own identity, certainly, but also cultural identity. Last night, my mom asked me why I didn’t think of myself as physically attractive. We were watching Entourage on HBO, and Mandy Moore was on, and Mom said, “isn’t that that actress everyone thinks you look like,” and I said, “yeah, but like a cute version of me.”

Anyway.

I explained that I believe on an intellectual level that I am attractive, but that on a subconscious level I am now, and will forever be, the girl nobody wanted to dance with in junior high. I was the girl who begged the football player to go to the dance, and I was the girl he stood up. I was the girl with lots of “guy friends” but no “boyfriends.” And, I was the girl that even the nerds wouldn’t touch. Ten years later, my body having escaped the vicious, oily throes of puberty, I still feel exactly the same. The image of myself that I formed then is still the image of myself that I hold now, even though photographs of me tell a different story. I began to wonder how many of us are still grappling with these outdated images of ourselves. Like Don Quixote, are we all jousting with the specters of our past selves?

In one of my favorite movies, Waking Life, one of the scenes discusses the problem of retaining a continuous sense of an identity in an incessantly changing and evolving body. The characters in the film explain that in order to connect the person you are today with the images you are shown of yourself as a child, you have to invent a story that explains what happened to that child to cause it to become you. This narrative, essentially, is a fiction – the fiction of our lives. Sartre says, “nous sommes condamnés d’être libres,” that we are ultimately forced to create our own self-definitions, and moreover, that we do so without always realizing it. What are these moments that force us to change our self-definitions? And, when those around us no longer perceive us as they once did, if we go from being treated as ugly to then treated as beautiful, why do we not change our self-definitions? How can we and why do we change or not change the fictions of our lives?

These narratives remind me of an article I just read on Oriononline.org called “Telling Stories” by Kelpie Wilson. Wilson argues, not unlike many scholars (Bill Moyers comes to mind here), that we need myths or legends to understand the world around us, and more importantly, to understand our proper role in relationship to humanity and the world. In particular, Wilson is referring to the story of Noah and the Flood in contrast to contemporary reactions to Hurricane Katrina. Wilson argues that in both cases, human beings were culpable, though surely more culpable today than in biblical times since in Noah’s day it was only the abstract problem of human immorality, the “noise” of the Babylonians, and not the CFCs and other ozone depleting gases that are causing global warming and exacerbating tropical storms. Nearly every culture has a story of the great flood in which the moral of the story is never to incur the wrath of God, but so far nobody has come up with a way to explain Hurricane Katrina or the dozens of other natural disasters suddenly affecting the planet as a result of human failure. Despite the fact that a majority of the members of the scientific community assert that global warming not only exists but is a direct result of pollution caused by human beings, the Bush administration still proudly refuses to even considering restraining greenhouse gas emissions or deigning to sign the Kyoto treaty. It seems that to everyone but ourselves, we are the cause of our own self-destruction. What will it take to make us change our own self-definitions and take responsibility for the affect we have on the planet? How can we create a fiction like Noah’s legend of the flood to make ourselves aware of who we really are and what we are really doing?

Isn’t it interesting that we need fiction in order to awaken to our self-awareness?

The author escapes her milieu. Provence presents a profound change of scenery. 

Four Minutes

The early morning sunlight beamed into the alleyway, an immense shaft of golden light that dispersed the frigid darkness and dismissed Jake from the dream world. Wiping the crust from his eyes, he saw that the hot vapors emanating from the airshaft on which he had been sleeping were wafting toward the light and wrapping themselves like tentacles around the pile of trash he had used to make a bed for the night. The vision of the swirling light made his dreams appear more real to him, more concrete. The menacing presence, the chase, and then the light…. And food. The strange, intangible perception of food that entered his body, and filled him, without even needing to open his mouth, chew, not even swallow. Nourishment penetrated into him, and he was at last alive, awake. Not anymore. Jake pressed his eyelids together, squeezing and creasing them to shut out the daylight and the shit stink of garbage all around.

“Hey, Jakie, you wanna hit?” A voice, gruff, jovial -- a friend? Wishing to return to the dream, Jake tensed all his muscles against the sound and the light, making his body into a stiff cocoon. Then, a gloved hand slapped the pile of garbage above his chest. The hand smelled like urine. Yes, he was a brother here.

“Hey man, wake up! You okay?”

Jake opened his eyes to find an enormous round face just inches from his own. Greasy locks of black hair stuck out from under his knit cap, drifting down his fat face into a beard that seemed to Jake to hold all he owned, garbage, maybe some bread crumbs, liquor and glue, and a one filthy pock-marked face. Jake thought he looked familiar, but it was hard to tell, harder and harder to remember. The black haired man had rolled out of his own makeshift bed, bringing some of his own garbage bedding with him, and now this garbage-hewn body was half pressed against his own, grinning with what was left of his teeth.

“Here, man, have some more of this.” He pressed a container of glue close to Jake’s face, beckoning him to put it to his lips. “You’ll feel better.”

Now Jake remembered, or he thought he did, though maybe he was just assembling the pieces of so many nights before, hunkered down in an alleyway with other tramps, thieves, psychotics, huffing glue to stave off the hunger, to dull the desperation they felt. He couldn’t remember the details of the previous night exactly, but he didn’t really need them to know what had happened, to understand the darkness and the light and the food that penetrated his belly in the dream. His head throbbed.

Jake reached for the bottle of glue, discovering his hands under the piles of newspaper and food wrappers. He lifted his head toward the bottle, let his fingers just touch the smooth coolness of it, and he could smell it already. His stomach turned sour. The fumes sickened him, and yet he needed them to get through another day. As the light pierced into his squinting eyes he angrily jerked the bottle, hands shaking, up against his nose, mentally sending a “fuck you” to the day and its beautiful shaft of light. Then, he paused. He opened his eyes into the light, feeling his pupils overflowing, burning, the throb in his head deepening. He held his gaze as long as he could stand it, then he looked at the black-haired man. He was watching Jake expectantly, waiting for his turn with the glue, but this time when he looked at him, his black-hair had turned blue, and it seemed to be undulating in the air, sparking like an icy blue flame. The man’s ruddy skin had turned a bright pink, and the sparse teeth in his mouth shone like diamonds. Jake looked down at himself, at his gaunt arms and legs, his distended belly, white as abalone glinting at him in the space between his undersized shirt and pants, and the garbage everywhere seemed organic to him, like the litter of leaves on a forest floor. It wasn’t the glue, it was the light. The light of another day.

“No, man.” Jake shoved the glue bottle back at the black-haired man.

“What you say, man?” Jake had mumbled. He wasn’t even sure if he had said anything at all, his voice seemed so far away. He wanted to speak clearly, but the fog of hunger was all around him now.

“No thanks, man,” Jake said forcefully. He didn’t mean it to sound mean, but the black-haired man recoiled as if he had been insulted.

“Whatever you say, but you’ll be sorry later when you got nothing to eat again, and you’ll be runnin’ all over this city tryin’ to find me and get you some of this, that’s all I’m sayin’!”

“Not this time, man. I’m done with that shit.”

“Yeah, right, like you think you’re special now, or something? Well, I’ve heard all that before.”

The black haired man gathered himself together, and hobbled down the alley, around a corner, and out of sight. Jake sat up, and pulled his knees to his chest. He looked at his knees and began to worry about them absent mindedly, a worry that came out of habit. He remembered his life years before, when he used to run track, how he would run so hard and fast that his knees would seem to crack and shudder under the weight of his pounding footfalls. His coach worried about his knees. His parents worried about his knees. And, Jake also worried about his knees. It was a silly thing to think about now, but it helped him remember. The pain he felt in his stomach and his head was so different from the pain he ever felt before, but the pain in his knees was the same, and it connected him back to the memories of houses, of family, of lovers, and then to the memories of painkillers, of depression, and the violence that swept him up and away from all of that. It was the drugs that finally led him here, to the streets.

Suddenly, a door opened into the alley, and Jake remembered why he was there. He was waiting. A young woman, with long blond hair swept back and tied behind her neck, and a black apron wrapped around her thin frame emerged from behind the steel door, carrying a bulging white plastic bag. Crossing the alley, she set the bag in front of the dumpster, and sighing with disgust, lifted the enormous plastic lid, hurling the garbage bag into the bowels of the sedan-sized container, slamming down the lid, and wiping her hands vigorously on her apron. Turning away from the dumpster, she finally noticed Jake, still sitting in his trash bed.

“Oh my god!” Startled, the woman clutched at the apron strings hanging over her chest. Jake felt self-conscious around people. He knew what he looked like. Or, he knew what he must look like to other people who so often looked at him like diseased vermin. The woman straightened. “Looks like breakfast is served, old man,” she snarled, mocking him. As she disappeared back beyond the threshold of the metal door, Jake heard her utter, “Ugh, gross!”

Forgetting his knees, his whereabouts, everything but his hunger, Jake ran toward the dumpster, flung open the lid, and pounced on the bag and its contents. Stale baked goods caked in coffee grounds and wilting salad greens, the remains of putrid fruits liquefying among fetid deli meats, the stuff Jake was grateful for, but could never convince himself was anything other than trash.

Jake ate slowly, taking care to smell everything first, checking for any mould or rot that might make him sick, and when he was finished, he stuffed what he could in his pockets, and put the rest back in the dumpster. Feeling his faculties more or less restored, he left the alley and passed in front of the restaurant whose trash, by way of necessity, had become Jake’s treasure. Looking through the plate-glass window and past couples seated around square tables in wooden chairs, sipping four-dollar coffees, some chatting, some reading the paper, he saw the young woman who had mocked him in the alley. He couldn’t stop thinking about what she had said. “Old man,” she had called him. Did he look old? He wasn’t old, or at least, he didn’t think that he was. He probably wasn’t much older than she was. But, that wasn’t how he looked. The sunlight glinted off the window and reflected back an image of himself. It was true. The dirt that covered his body had crusted around his eyes and settled into the creases that had formed there and at the corners of his mouth. Jake had aged, though he was not really old. Jake then looked past the image of himself and saw that one of the café patrons was looking at him, scowling as though Jake had actually been staring at him and not his own reflection. Jake tried to smile an apology, he wanted to politely mouth the words, “oops, sorry, my mistake, silly me,” but the meanness in his look, in the dirt on his face, in the grease and tears in his clothes, spoke for him. The man on the other side of the glass rolled his eyes and returned to his paper, looking disgusted.

Jake headed down the street toward the public library where he usually went to get some rest in a remote study carrel, and as he walked, the cool dampness of the morning wrapped itself around his skin, sinking into his bones. He watched the businessmen and women in suits with their to-go cups of coffee enviously, imagining the sensuous feel of hot liquid sliding down his throat, warming his belly, or just sitting there in a cup between his hands. He noticed the way the suits would drape on the bodies of the passersby, shielding them from the cold, from the stares of other people that so easily penetrated his own tattered clothes, announcing their status and integrity. Before, he remembered being taken to a restaurant where you were not served unless you were wearing a jacket and tie. Jake hadn’t understood this about the restaurant, and when he arrived without a jacket and tie, they were provided for him. Looking around him now at all those suits, he wondered why someone couldn’t just lend him one, at least as long as it would take to get a meal, or go back and see the young woman at the café who called him old and have her smile at him just like she smiled at all the other customers.

Jake stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. His chest filled with air fast, so fast, his heart ached, and he thought he would be sick . Just then, a woman bumped up against him, tripping over his feet and her own match-stick heels. Holding tight to her to-go cup and cell phone, she interrupted her conversation long enough to swear in his face. The light expanded all around him, illuminating the people on the street, the water on the pavement shimmering like liquid silver. He turned around, and headed toward the Y.

. . .

Julia breathed a sigh of relief over his naked body. She had spent her entire Saturday afternoon waiting by the phone for him to call, deliberating over the outfit she would wear to seduce him, primping and pawing at herself in the mirror, applying and re-applying rouge and lipstick. Now, finally, she had conquered him. Her handiwork lay in a pile on the floor beside the bed, her makeup totally smeared. The vision and fulfillment of her fantasy was realized. The rush of victory and the intoxication of its spoils flowed like the sweat between her breasts. Reaching her arm over his heaving chest, she let her lips curl back into a smile that might appear to him to signify sexual fulfillment, but really it was the same smile she wore after she bought her favorite pair of strappy high-heels, sling-backs with an open toe. True, she likes to fuck, loves it in fact. She loves the feel of a man’s weight pressed against her body, the scent of their intermingling sweat, the release of orgasm, the rapture of the denouement. But, it isn’t a physical need. Owning a vibrator made her independent, and average, she thought. No, she does it to enjoy this moment, when she is lost in the twilight of sex, between the brusque brevity of the deed and a requisite few minutes of cuddling. It has nothing to do with this Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus ultra-sensitive new-age femininity pap. For Julia, it was about conquest, pure and simple. For the duration of intercourse, the woman possesses the man in mind, body, and spirit. Somewhere, Julia had read that for the average couple, sex lasts for a mere four minutes, and in her experience, this was a pretty accurate assessment. Nonetheless, for these four perfect minutes, Julia would do almost anything. The average woman, Julia thought, would do almost anything.

But, what the authors of all these hip new millennium over-the-counter couples counseling books were trying to get at is why the average woman, why Julia, feels the need for a man’s undivided attention and perhaps even the possession of his very soul. These hack therapists would delve into the woman’s childhood, Julia’s childhood, where they would find an absentee and emotionally distant father, a single mother, and sparse opportunities for true companionship. Not surprising, not because this information presents an extraordinary causal link but rather because it’s mundane, average. So, maybe all women are trying to replace the fathers they’ve lost or think they’ve lost. Or, maybe, just maybe for four minutes out of the day they want to feel they’ve got something on men; that, for all their hard work at 70% of a man’s salary they might actually be getting somewhere in this man’s world. Julia made enough money. Sometimes, she made more money than the men she dated, but she thought it best to keep that to herself. She didn’t think it was about money. She thought she probably resented the men she slept with in this abstract sort of way, the way her therapist, the way the therapists on TV, had described what she was feeling, but she didn’t resent any individual men. She wasn’t frigid, that was for sure.

Smiling, twirling her fingers around his fine chest hair, Julia knew her time was almost up. Most men had a limit of about fifteen minutes on the after-sex cuddling, and she could already see his eyes wander to the pile of clothes on the floor. It took her years to build up the emotional barrier to her tears at this moment. It was more than the moment of separation, even worse than rejection. It was the death of the dream. When the time was up, she no longer possessed him, was no longer the powerful one. She was weak again, and her weakness shot up to the surface like a drowning man gasping for air. She tried to think of a way to make him stay, to arouse him again even though she was already sore. Anything to grasp that power again, to take in his masculinity and make it hers, for at least four minutes, but it was no use. No, he would say, have to work early in the morning. So, gathering her last bit of strength, she told him to leave, that she was tired and needed to sleep. Perhaps it was spiteful, but the only way she knew to hang on to a bit of that strength was to reject him before he rejected her. And he left, and she felt hollow inside.

Julia wrapped herself in her robe and sat by the window to watch his car pull out away, sitting at an angle in the darkness so that he couldn’t see her watching him leave. When he was gone, she went back to bed and tried to sleep, but it was no use. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and went down to the corner store to pick up a pint of ice cream and a copy of the Sunday paper. It seemed strangely reassuring that the she could always get the Sunday paper on a Saturday night. Returning home, she sat in her kitchen and slowly lifted spoonfuls of ice cream to her lips, absent mindedly leafing through tomorrow’s news. She read through the headlines quickly, hoping to find some crucial piece of information that might somehow make things seem different, but it was all pretty much the same news as always. War, famine in Africa, a robbery, corruption in Washington, a human interest piece about a life-saving dog, and a curious story about homeless man in the local section.

The night seemed especially dark. Her fluorescent kitchen light tried vainly to stave off the cold loneliness of it, giving off a warm low hum that she usually found comforting, but neither the light nor the news could distract her from whatever it was she was feeling. She tried to think about how much fun she had had that night, but when she thought about it, “fun” didn’t seem like the word to describe it. She padded back to bed, wrapping the blankets around her, still fully clothed, and closed her eyes. As she drifted off to sleep, she longed for those four perfect minutes and dreamed of the day when she might not need them anymore.

. . .

The polyester suit made a strange sort of swishing, squeaking sound as Jake walked down the street. His hands shook as he swept them through his still wet hair. He looked around him, at the other people on the street, waiting for one of them to point him out as an imposter. But, nobody did. He smiled at someone, an older gentleman in a suit that appeared almost as dated as his own, and incredibly the man smiled back.

Jake didn’t like to lie if he didn’t have to, but he needed the suit and the shower if he was going to eat. The suits and the showers are supposed to be for people with job interviews, and Jake didn’t have a job interview, but he didn’t see why he needed one just to get a suit and a hot shower, so he lied. The YMCA had acquired only a few of these charity suits, and the ones they did have were painfully outmoded and oversized, and Jake had to wait all day for his suit, the one that might fit him, to be returned before he had to go to his “interview” that evening. They let him nap on a cot, and when it was his turn, they gave him soap and a clean towel and showed him the showers, which were arranged communally, locker room style, and smelled intensely of mildew. The suit was powder blue with white pinstripes and broad shoulders, which made him think that all he needed was a pair of oversized shoes and a rubber nose and he might have actually been given a job as a clown, but he kept this thought to himself. He was grateful.

He wanted to go to the café and see the young woman, but he thought better of it. She might recognize him, though seeing himself again in the reflection of another restaurant window, he wasn’t so sure. The dirt was washed away, and the creases in his face were no longer visible. He didn’t look old anymore. It wasn’t exactly what he remembered from before, but it wasn’t what he expected to see now. He went, instead, to a nice Italian restaurant whose aromas had tempted him so many times before.

Table for one, please. Table for one, please. He repeated over and over in his head as he approached the host. Table for one, please. The smells of the restaurant were overwhelming. Warm, steaming plates of pasta, roasted tomatoes and peppers, oregano, yeasty smells of baking breads and pizza dough, the sounds of jazz music coming from somewhere, emanating magically from every corner of the place. It was still early for dinner, yet the booths and tables were already filling with couples, families, the music mixing with their excited voices and the tinkling of glasses. Table for one, please. Jake felt warm, dizzy. Table for one…

“May I help you,” asked the host sweetly behind his dais.

“Table for one, please.” Jake felt his lips move, but he wasn’t even sure if he had said anything.

“Right this way, sir.”

The host seated Jake in the back of the restaurant, at a small table near the kitchen. Probably where they kept the people they didn’t want seated in the window, the ones wearing bad polyester suits, he thought. But, it didn’t matter. The host was telling him about the specials.

Jake ordered wine. He ordered a mixed-greens salad with vinaigrette and feta cheese. He ordered an enormous plate of pasta with meatballs and marinara sauce. He politely requested extra bread, and resisted the urge to line his pockets with it. He ordered desert twice. Neapolitan ice cream and chocolate cake. Jake ate slowly, smelling everything, but not for mould or disease this time. He was careful that none of the food should intermingle, tasting everything in its proper sequence, exactly as it should be. He talked with his waitress, a lovely dark-skinned woman with short curly hair who was working to become a dancer, and had to work nights at the restaurant to get by.

“You look like a dancer,” he told her, “the way you hold the plates, the way you walk. You’re very graceful.” He thought he saw her blush when he smiled at her.

The chef came out from the kitchen to ask him how he was enjoying his dinner.

“Oh, wonderful, everything is so delicious!” Time seemed to stall, the world turned around him, around his whims and pleasures. When the waitress brought the check, he half expected to produce a wallet with a credit card from his jacket, thinking what a wonderful benefactor the polyester clown costume had been. The plan he had devised for himself was to feign as though he had left his wallet on accident in the car, and then when he left to go get it, he would just leave, and never come back. Now, though, he hesitated.

“Um, miss,” Jake beckoned the waitress, “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee before I go. I’ve got a long way home tonight, quite a drive!”

Jake sat with his cup of coffee, the warmth of the cup penetrating his hands, the sensual feeling of the hot liquid filling his full belly. Just a few more minutes, he thought, and then I’ll leave. Four minutes, maybe five. I’ll return the suit to the Y. He thought somewhat doubtfully that they might even have a bed available for him tonight, so he wouldn’t have to spend another night in the alley, waking up to another breakfast of garbage and glue, and the awful shit stink of the sewer vapors swirling in the daylight, smothering him in his garbage bed.

“Miss,” he called for the beautiful dancing waitress again. “I don’t have any money.” Jake looked into her eyes. He expected to see disgust there, but there wasn’t any. There wasn’t pity either. It was, Jake thought, a sort of recognition.

The police came and arrested Jake, and they told him he would have to spend a few days in jail. The food in jail was nothing like the fare at the Italian restaurant, but it wasn’t glue or garbage either. He thought about the dancer, and wondered if she’d still be there when he got out, or if she’d have gotten her big break by then. He hoped she would wait on him again, next time.

. . .

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