Week 17: Gypsy

Whether it’s the two weeks each summer my parents spent dragging my sister and me around the country on quintessentially American road trips or a need to correct my very Midwestern mostly monolingual sense of smallness and provincialism and general inadequacy among the wider world or just that I read too many books—whatever the reason, I have a serious thing for travel. Now, as a salaried, property-owning, tax-paying adult, I still try to leave the country twice a year. And it all started when I was finishing up college with only a studio apartment and a non-benefit-providing barista job to my name and I decided to ignore the indignity of becoming a cliché and backpack through Europe for as long as my savings would last.

That wound up being six weeks. To tell the whole story would be dull to you, and maybe to me, too, but a good portion of it can be explained like this.

Claire wakes up in a terrible hostel in an incredibly beautiful ancient city. Claire orders coffee and says thank you in the native language, but if asked any questions or made any conversation with must say: “I don’t speak _____. Do you speak English?” also in the native language but with less confidence and worse pronunciation. Claire wanders around the city with her head craned looking at things that are so staggeringly old and famous that she literally cannot believe, at certain moments, that what she is seeing is real and not a movie set. Claire buys apples and cheese and bread and chocolate and eats lunch in a park and/or overlooking a river and thinks how amazingly lucky she is and also how strange this all is, that almost no one in the world even knows where she is and no one here knows who she is and the possibilities for life are just endless. Claire wanders more, visits a church or a museum, and as the trip wears on they all start to look awfully similar, but she continues to go because she may never get this opportunity again. Claire sits in a café and reads a book and people-watches until her feet throb a little less. Claire pays too much for dinner at a tourist restaurant with outdoor tables on a plaza because it feels less weird to eat alone there. Claire gets back to the hostel about the time everyone else is leaving because she would rather stab herself in the eye than go drinking with the girls she’s bunking with. Claire lies in bed, knowing she’s wasting an opportunity for something here but feeling too lonely and anxious, not just for this night but about life in general, real life, the bit that’s waiting back at home, to do anything but cry for a minute and then fall asleep.

That’s the bulk of the trip in a nutshell. I did learn some other individual lessons along the way that have served me well.

Paris, August: Real gypsies look more like TV gypsies than you’d imagine. You will still feel bad yelling at their children.

Berlin: Staying with locals means you see 50 percent fewer monuments and have 100 percent more fun.

Vienna: If you are a Euro-looking person sitting quietly by yourself in a Euro-looking country, a group of Japanese tourists might descend suddenly and begin posing with you for pictures.

Prague: Beer is good.

Budapest: When you get the flu and you’re all alone in a strange country where you don’t speak the language and you’re dehydrated and disoriented and you think you’re going to die—you probably aren’t.

Florence: Do not agree to tour museums with an Australian girl who would rather be getting picked up by greasy fellow expats at an ersatz Irish pub.

Rome: Do not agree to room with the world’s peskiest and dumbest Australian girl when she tags along to the next city on your itinerary.

Riomaggiore: When you’re at a seaside resort where they don’t allow cars, and a heavy storm rolls in, and then there’s a train strike so no one can go in or out, it feels more like an Agatha Christie story than is comfortable.

Paris again, October: Off-season travel is the way to go.

Plane to Chicago: This internal dialogue will never end: I can’t wait to get home. I can’t wait to go back. What am I going to do now? Where am I going to go next?

Week 16: Perch

When I lived in New York I hung out on my fire escape all the time, because it seemed like the most classic New York thing I could do. I was dating the cinematographer who lived upstairs, you see, one obsessed with the beautiful face of New York—Manhattan, specifically, Woody-Allen-style—and how it glowed on film. We were both native Midwesterners. This is why we were both so in love with the New York we’d had in our minds and were so disappointed and angry when we showed up and realized it didn’t exist anymore (maybe never had existed?) and yet couldn’t tell anyone, because what could we say? That he’d wanted it to be 1975 and well-dressed people would just be standing on every perfectly lit street corner breaking up inelegantly and yet hyper-literately? That I’d wanted it to be 1950 and if I showed up all in black at any random Village café with a notebook, a handsome writer would just swagger over, read me his latest poem, and we’d shack up together in a cold-water flat? I heard a hundred bad poetry readings and drank endless cups of coffee but Gregory Corso never showed up so I went home and climbed out the window to sit on the fire escape. I’d scribble in my composition book, wish I smoked so I could be smoking, and keep my eyes and ears open to the street for inspiration.

Mostly I just saw people pushing along about their daily business. There was a Catholic girls primary school across the street, so in the mornings the first waves of commuters would wash along not just businesspeople but little girls in untidy uniforms, the occasional over-protective parent, and tight packs of nuns in long blue skirt suits.

During the day, it was the usual parade of humanity—babushkas doing shopping, college kids doing laundry, hipsters doing nothing. Homeless people shifting themselves from one scaffolding to another depending on where work was being done. Kids out at three, Catholic and public and private school populations mixing up with one another at the pizza place. Then commuters rushing back starting at four and continuing into the evening, eventually blending in with people going out for the night.

Then the night crowds—fights over cabs, laughs over spilled drinks, serious, quiet discussions about who knows what. A guy buying flowers at the bodega. Were they for a first date? His wife’s birthday? Because he forgot his wife’s birthday last week? His boyfriend? His grandmother? Himself?

I sat up on my fire escape, pen and notebook in hand, and despite the fact that the whole city, which could really be the whole of humanity, every situation and emotion and stage, was laid out literally at my feet, I wrote about my own angst and loneliness. I couldn’t really see anything. I was twenty. Forgive me.

Week 15: Warrant

It was there on Breaking News first thing Monday morning. The suspect was still at large. There was a warrant out for his arrest. He was considered dangerous. If anyone had any knowledge of his whereabouts, they should call Belmont detectives or 911.

There wasn’t a picture, but just by the description, despite the generic name of Michael Johnson, I knew it had to be him. Six foot six, thin, dark hair, glasses. Day trader, comic book illustrator, jazz pianist. Funny that his vocations all called for his stretched-out frame to hunch over, fold itself in quarters. Resident of the center of a neighborhood that had been swanky ten years ago when his rich father bought him a condo in his company’s development there.

To be honest, it wasn’t surprising that he’d strangled that girl. Allegedly, of course, but none of us thought there was any “allegedly” about it. We didn’t know the girl, but then, it had been years since we’d known Michael—if, it should be owned up to, any one of us could have said we really knew him back then.

The surprising thing was this idea that he was now on the run. It was only on rare occasions, with great effort and many pills (so people said), that he went out at all. Usually he invited a few select people to his place, a little salon. I think it was through Mina that we started getting invitations. They were wonderful parties, full of fascinating talk, good food, better drinks, and prime connections to be made if you were the connecting sort.

He was always at ease at home in his ultramodern loft with the view of downtown. When he controlled the music, temperature, guest list, menu, and topics of conversation, you never met someone as pleasant or affable. You wouldn’t say warm—no. But sociable.

He did go out into the world once in a while, and that was where we got the inkling that there could be trouble. Jazz shows or comic book signings would get him out. Things he wanted to experience in person. But he always seemed a bit dazed, a bit out-of-sync. Never seeming to recognize people he’d met at his own home several times. Never engaging in any conversation. He’d jerk and freeze like a squirrel when someone approached him with hand extended. At shows, he’d sit in a booth at the very front and refuse to have anyone join him. At signings, he’d go through the line first, never say a word to the author, and then rush out again.

Apparently that’s where he met the poor girl. She was a clerk at a comic shop he’d gone to for a signing a few weeks ago. She had no idea who he was, and he had no idea how to approach someone. So—allegedly, of course—he started stalking her. Somehow that wound up with her strangled and left in the snow in the alley behind her two-flat.

But the question was, where could he be now? He had no money of his own; I heard that both he and his father lost piles during the recession. I couldn’t remember him seeming close to anyone at the salons or hearing of any particular friends. Acquaintances and associates galore, but I doubt he would have known most people’s last names or physical addresses. I pictured him in the back aisles of a comic shop with the latest issue of a local indie held up to his face, just his bespectacled eyes peering over the top, paranoid, and rightly so, looking for cops and snitches. Or holed up in the front booth of a jazz club on the South Side so cool it had no name, slumped down, his hand shaking every time he took a drink. Running out of pills to keep him cool. Running out of places to hide. I made a mental note to check back later in the day. I was sure they’d catch him by then.

Week 14: Involved

[Note: This is the first week where I got a word, tried to write something, and had to scrap it entirely. The word was resound. The piece was awful. It was about 9/11, if that tells you anything. Anyway, the one that's actually getting published today, to be honest, isn't much better. People have off weeks. This is one of mine. Just wanted to be upfront about that.]

When I talk with my country relatives about city life, the bit that’s strangest to them is how you can live in such close proximity to so many people and still be total strangers to one another, keep yourself apart somehow. And I’ll admit it’s hard for me to figure out when to be the standard isolated urban figure and when to allow myself to get involved.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve watched more than a few mothers scream, curse, and hit their children, and I’m talking young, like toddlers, babies. And not said anything, just stared out the window. Live in a city long enough and you’re lying if you say you’ve never done the same. You feel the horrible guilt at not sticking up for a child who clearly has no one sticking up for her, but it’s been a long day and you can’t deal with one more fight and the mom is clearly crazy so what if she starts hitting you, and no one else on this bus is doing anything so you’re just going to shut up and not do anything, too.

Same thing with gangbangers. I have, like anyone with a sense of self-preservation who’s lived in a city for any length of time, mastered the art of not looking at anything while walking down the street. I deploy this not-looking technique out of habit anytime several young men are standing on my corner. I know it’s my neighborhood, that it’s my job to help keep it safe and make it better for everyone. I’ve got as big a stake as them in what happens to this block. But I also know that they are four men and I am one woman, and if they are doing anything they don’t want me to see, they probably have guns, and so I would rather just not see it.

I use a modified version of this technique with homeless people. If you actually see a homeless person as he is and you have any shred of compassion, part of you will want to give him something. I know one person who, within a week of moving from a small Michigan town to New York City, gave away $100 to the homeless. This was a poor student who could barely keep himself in ramen. Another friend, also from a small town, gave the coat off her back to a homeless woman. I haven’t given anything to a homeless person in about eight years. I just not-look at them, register them as simply a person, refuse to see any details, say “Sorry, sir,” or “Sorry, ma’am,” and do not stop walking.

A trickier version of this is not hearing. It’s the one you have to use if you dare to walk around as a female on a street where there’s a certain brand of men. There’s a lot of dissent about this, I know. Some women say that you have to talk back to catcallers, to let them know that what they’re doing is not OK, that you’re a person with feelings and the right to walk down the street unharassed. I used to do this. I used to scream back at guys and flip them off and get in their faces. (That was back when I wore steel-toed boots and had pink hair, if that helps contextualize it for you.) But it didn’t make me feel safer or stronger. It made me feel angrier and weaker, to have to engage with them, to acknowledge what they were doing and the fact that I couldn’t stop them, could only impotently react afterward and have them laugh in my face or say something further infuriating like, “Why don’t you just smile, baby? You could be so pretty if you’d smile.” So now I just keep walking, not looking, not hearing, trying not to twitch, trying to let it roll off me.

There are just too many people in cities to interact with everybody all the time. Our personal boundary lines are constantly bumping into one another and overlapping. If we actually recognized that, we probably couldn’t live this way. We’d go crazy from the constant pressure and absolute lack of privacy. Learning how to close yourself off and sail through is necessary for survival.