WAY TO GO OHIO, part 6

after the disappointment of sunday morning's breakfast burlesque (which was more a failure on the part of the venue in getting our breakfast orders right than anything else, but nonetheless also a failure of the show), we were excited for that night's drag pageant, and especially so after we'd found out (that evening) that we'd been identified in a photograph as the perfectly disinterested party to another (better) party and chosen as guest judges. unfortunately, although we showed up almost too promptly at five until eight to judge them, the contestants had apparently decided that this wasn't their sunday to be judged, and we heard from a man in the parking lot that the disco would be shut until it opened for church at eleven-thirty. way to go. at least the restaurant out the covered driveway and down the street had all day sunday happy hour that included a guided tour of all of its twenty-first amendment cans.

and fortunately, that gave us time to review our schedules, set a date for the company holiday party, and then to remember that this week was the week we had slated for our overnight in youngstown, which we'd identified as one of the places where motel 6 had brought together its special combination of "modern style, functionality and value" in the rust belt. finally. from the ashes: "phoenix" by priestmangoode, and only a few years behind the times at the date of our reservations. so out of the frying pan and into the fire, with the hope was that there would be a decent hamburger grilling somewhere nearby. and, fortunately, the new suit arrived from the ladies at duchess via priority mail on monday afternoon, so we packed three changes of our almost best clothes into the volvo bat pod and headed into the tepid december downpour toward steeltown, u.s.a. the next day.

unfortunately, as a result of the downpour we weren't able to enjoy the more normal, (sometimes) less inclement late fall bleakness of the buckeye state as we drove. even the relative splendor of the goodyear campus was obscured by the sheets of rain coming up from the wheels of the semis doing eighty in the left lane as we passed through the curves out of akron. fortunately, we had the remnants of the style and opinion sections left over from sunday's breakfast; and, maybe unfortunately, we had the leftover torment and comfort of two relationships that we had left behind us in columbus. i read, and we jawed. i stumbled over an articulation of my confusion, and she drove through the rain with the surety of her understanding. and there we were when it got too dark to read.

darkness fell fully about ten minutes after we'd finished our thirty seconds on kent state when we passed that exit. then the lake, and then the reservoir, and then we noticed that we were hungry but fortunately we were almost to the motel. i'd called from those curves in akron to cancel one of the two king rooms that she'd reserved, and when we arrived she left me in the car to go get the key for the room that we'd be sharing from the jennifer that i'd talked to on the phone. she had just known it was her as soon as she'd walked into the lobby, jennifer had said. jennifer had also given her a guide to every motel 6 in north america which specifically designated those which had undergone a redesign.

room 115 wasn't, as they say, at all bad. with adjustments made for relative cost, the motel 6 in youngstown -- if not arguably comparable -- at least elicited a comparison with the general ambience of the thompson chain. no? perhaps, i'll admit, not the views. our room was on the first floor, and although the rain had abated the dark still kept us from gauging the appearance of our surroundings.  for the time being, however, that was for the better, because it meant that we needn't rally to try to find something closer to the center of town. they weren't at the denny's that jennifer had recommended, but we'd gotten wind of some good burgers through the rain, and they were there to be had at a place just down the road. so we dolled up -- better than sufficient for dinner out in any of the places where that other chain had a hotel (although i had regrettably forgotten to pack cufflinks) -- and put ourselves back in the bat pod. his and hers grasping, imperative misadventure. jennifer was right to have suspected.

the internet had advised us that shaker's bar & grill was dimly lit, and that, in fact, had been an encouraging factor in our making our decision (since drawing too much attention to our likely celebrity would be just gauche ostentation). and to be sure, the entryway off the nearly empty parking lot on belmont avenue near the cluster of budget motels was dim. we might have figured it was closed if a man hadn't come out of the door as we were walking over from the nearly empty lot of the vacant whatever next door where we had mistakenly parked. inside, however, shaker's -- if nearly uninhabited -- wasn't all that dark. but that might have been the holiday lighting, which included white lighted miniature christmas trees between the triangular booths across from the bar. as we were finishing our burgers, which we agreed must be the best in town (and were definitely the best of what we'd sampled), we joined the only other conversation in the restaurant, which was taking place between the booth behind us and the two stools closest to us at the bar. there was supposed to be a gaudy display of lights at a house at the end of kingwood lane. the neighbors invited us to have a look. and our waitress, who we suspected at that point might also be the mayor, told us that we should probably take the treasurer's wife up on her offer. so we finished and left, smiling and eager, having also given our compliments to the cook, who it turned out might have also been the steel town's barber/dentist. the one night carnival that might have been the surreptitiously fabled best of youngstown, ohio met us that night at shaker's by tacit appointment and, for better or worse, we got its best.

unfortunately, the display on kingwood was hardly gaudy enough to warrant a photo. the treasurer's wife had probably just exaggerated as the result of too much holiday cheer. it probably wasn't every day that she and the other regulars had a chance to sing the praises of their city to anyone from -- "where were you from?" -- and there didn't seem to be much else shaking outside of shaker's. and regardless, we'd only been hoping for good burgers, which we got. and we also got a warm (almost feverish) welcome at the giant eagle where we went to buy drinks and scratch offs for our television party back at the motel. like jennifer, the adorably excited checkout clerk had recognized us as someones from somewhere else. the luck he wished us went with us, and we netted eight dollars on our lottery tickets before stripping off the finery and planting ourselves on the bed: three bottles of water, a glass of emergen-c and all of the takeout to make sure that the party didn't carry over into the morning.

awake, fortunately unearly. unfortunately, the cufflinks weren't the only things we'd forgotten, and the motel 6 redesign didn't include toothbrushes or hairdryers (the latter of which seemed to be an unfortunately glaring oversight). the man at the front desk who wasn't jennifer offered me toothpaste, but i had that. then he obliged with directions to the dollar general. then quickly into outfits number three and out the door. it was colder than it had been on tuesday, but the skies were clear. the certified escort vehicle that had been in the parking lot when we got back from the carnival the night before was gone, so after checking out with the man who wasn't jennifer, we got back in the volvo and headed downtown.

fortunately, we hadn't missed anything for the rain and the darkness the night before. there's hardly anything downtown. the coffee was good at the independent cafe that seemed to have replaced a seattle's best across the street from a vacant middle-rise that stood at the northwest corner of the main square. and the management was happy to give us easy directions to the oak hill cemetery. otherwise, there was nothing to indicate that youngstown was one of the ten best places to start a new business, as a banner on the side of one downtown building (likely vacant) proclaimed had been decreed by entrepreneur magazine. (who knew what was on display at the museum of labor and industry advertised by a highway sign near the motel.)

the factory by the river was still spewing smoke from some of its smokestacks, but it was hard to say what workers might have been making in the half of the factory buildings that still seemed to be operational. to the northeast, the onion domes of the holy trinity ukrainian catholic church and its adjacent stone cross (not unreminiscent of the cross at the valley of the fallen) commanded the skyline. there is a higher percentage of ukrainians in youngstown than there are in the world, so we'll say they have a presence. that presence must, however, be recent, because the headstones at oak hill don't show any earlier signs. whether or not the ukrainians were involved in the boom times of steeltown might be adressed at the labor and industry museum, but we'll just have to speculate because we didn't go. we spent all of our time trying to find breakfast on market, which, although it was obviously the main commercial drag of the area (and was advertising big dicks), didn't seem to host a single diner. the motel 6 redesign might have made its way to youngstown -- however late -- but the brunch trend never did. (way to go?)

in the end, after making our way through the modern love and draft columns of the opinion section, we found ourselves back past akron in seville. (we hadn't, however, made it so far south on market that we ended up in lisbon.) there was a mexican restaurant and there were churches. so we kept moving. and not that we needed anything exactly, but we'd already saved the sunk cost so we took the outlet mall exit, threw our beautifully tailored sleeves in the air and sat down to breakfast at two-thirty at the bob evans in lodi. not that we needed anything exactly, but we couldn't leave the pendleton outlet without a purchase. (way to go portland.)

when we exited 71 at the 97 exit, it might have been getting dark. we got gas and cashed in our scratch offs, and the cash we got we used to buy two more. and then it was certainly dark. and then home. no luck. we'd made it to that motel 6 on the night of the carnival, but somehow, with all the non-activity, we never managed to finish with the leftovers of that comfort and torment.

AND THEN THERE WERE THREE

"we should say hello," he says, because he hates it when he runs into people whom he's met and they turn away when their eyes meet, as soon as he's about to greet them. i agree, more or less, with the sentiment, although i don't always act on it in practice. to be sure, i'd been the one who'd turned us away when the man we'd met those weeks before near the dart board at that other place had seemed to recognize us. it was less awful if we didn't see his face make the transition to familiarity. but then later i ask if he doesn't remember meeting that other guy that other day, and he says that we should put ourselves back in a position where we can say hello. because he hates that. i, i say, hate that we're going to force ourselves into a conversation. but he says that we'll just say hello and leave. because he wants to have friends here when i inevitably leave, he says. i turn to him slowly, and i quickly give him a smirk that smacks of a recent transition to too much familiarity. and then we go to the bar and say hello. the man from those weeks ago remembers us but doesn't remember our names. he is all smiles. and of course he wants to go to that other place and play pool or something with us, and of course we have to say yes, and not just because that other place was the place where we'd been planning to go after we'd said hello and left. these things are, of course, the things that always start with something like a friendly game of pool. but before we can get to all the other things we have to get to that other place and to the pool table to have that game, which turns into a few or several, during which i find myself proclaiming that of course there were nazis in the government of the federal republic. and when he tells me (after telling us about his three years in cologne) that my appeal to incontrovertible "historical fact" smacks of religious fanaticism, i remind him that (my cousin) his beloved chancellor is a representative of the christian democratic union. and so yes, the sovereign debt crisis (as the north has decided to term the fallout of its colonization of the south) is just german business as usual. i pontificate. we argue about extraterrestrial life. is the concept related philosophically to our perception of our happiness on earth? a tallboy of labatt blue is just two dollars, and so he still thinks the both of us are really cute. plus, he likes contention. and then there were three. that's what you get for saying hello. but at breakfast the next morning i don't have a puzzle so i have time to think, and all i can think, over the worrisome pound of my heartbeat and so far away from my soapbox, is that i can't be sure who it was who picked up whom -- although i was absolutely right about those nazis.

DOUBLE DOUBLE; or, CONSCIENCE BURN...AND REAL ESTATE BUBBLE?

when the bars closed early sunday morning, there wasn't a single cab to be had anywhere on main street in vancouver. i mean, there were swarms of cabs, they just weren't for the having. flagging was pointless, not to mention the danger of approaching the curb (let alone leaving it) and getting closer to the aggressive flow of traffic. the only vehicles with their top lights lit up were ambulances, and although they weren't as numerous as the occupied cabs they were screaming past regularly in both directions collecting party casualties, some of whom might possibly have staggered themselves too close to an unavailable taxi and been hit as they were trying in vain to hail a ride. zombies.

most everyone was in costume. vancouver, they told me, loves halloween. or, rather, vancouver loves costumes, they told me, and halloween is an easy excuse to indulge. as for us, we had indulged the night before and so were the exception on the streets when we went out. i had never seen so many people on the sidewalks of...anywhere, really, who were in costume simply for the fact of the holiday and a saturday. the entire city all dressed up and, it seemed for the most part, with nowhere in particular to go. so they went places. to the places that were available to them to go. and unfortunately that meant a long lineup of costumes outside of "hot one inch action," which meant that we didn't get the opportunity to trade any limited edition buttons -- or even see which ones had been made for the event this year. true, it's what we'd been looking forward to throughout the long afternoon aftermath of our indulgence the night before (including throughout the overlong only one mop cleanup of the toast collective where the dance party had been), but we hadn't come prepared to wait in rain with the characters of "adventure time."

it's easily possible that the gallery had planned this year's action for halloween saturday in order to make itself a place to get dressed up and go. it's also possible that the event had just gotten big. since i'd last visited, the city had been dressing itself up. maybe dubiously, but indubitably. gastown had definitively annexed the part of the demilitarized zone to its east/southeast and solidified its borders around a moodily gleaming design and lifestyle district. with the bulwark of chinatown pushing back along the vector of the opposite diagonal, the dmz had been squeezed essentially flat, into a cross of sidewalks with the heart of its squirming, dispossessed body at the intersection of main and east hastings, its feet milling up and down both sides of the latter as the street made its way through strathcona. the safe injection site at 139 hastings street east marks the edge of the western front at the bottom of the downtown hill. even the rents at the remaining residence hotels must be skyrocketing (not to mention that their old neon would probably look fantastic against refurbished facades and that they were likely already the subject of speculation). the panhandlers who had made their way through the architects, diner-shoppers and post-hipster tattoo artists all the way up to water street were panhandling for fives. but anymore, it's not so much the social services crowd bleeding back against the redevelopment push as the reverse ingress of the well heeled and costumed onto the sidewalks of the main/hastings cross that illustrates the tide of the conflict. from in between the grocery cart pushers, the junkies and the fawn legged prostitutes in miniskirts: the unmistakable drag of the contemporary young professional.

i had been driven by it a number of times in the past but had never before made it inside of spartacus books, which is located at the bottom of the cross across from the avalon on hastings as it makes its way through strathcona. on this visit, however, i made a point of passing by on foot during decent weekday hours. and on that friday noon i was part of the ingress (indubitably if maybe also dubiously), coming as i was from near the east van cross at clark and great northern way snapping photos (although i never got around to getting a photo of the cross itself). the non-profit, volunteer staffed store has a surprisingly large selection of journals for its size, many of them (of course) canadian and many of them (of course) with an obvious leftward lean. but there are poetry and fiction journals too. that friday, the staff was reorganizing the bookshelves, but i still found a used copy of the psychogeography collection edited by will self for under eleven dollars. inexpensive enough, yes, but too big and too heavy to have to carry around all day and then later have to pack with all the others and carry around for the rest of my trip. so i bought a magnet and a button as souvenirs, the button a bit of a crossword puzzle showing the words "mend," "melee" and "vneck." something for my lapel for the weekend, and good thing, since we wouldn't be waiting in the rain for the one inch action the next night.

afterward i walked through strathcona and onto main street from behind the train station, then up the hill to spend the rest of my afternoon looking for something signature secondhand that would be all the more special for my having not bought it in the states. from past experience i'd considered c'est la vie to be my best bet, but the woman there didn't seem to want anything to do with customers that day. luckily, i'd already found a vintage tote at woo when i got there and didn't feel at all put out by her inattentiveness. anyway, there wasn't a thing in the scaled back men's section that i wanted. plus, i needed to stop...although that didn't stop me from getting something else from the fancy thrift store on cordova when i'd made it back down the hill and into gastown. mercifully, my bandmate confirmed the advisability of the purchase when i met her back at the flower shop. an old piano key belt was definitely something that someone in our group would wear (offstage). we'd just been talking about the development of our new project the previous afternoon as we were making deliveries in yaletown and on granville island. rosehip & wax flower was a serious group about unserious shit. or something in between that and the other way around. unsarcastic songs about the bitterness of first world problems. "it's the sherry again." that was going to be the hit.

 

but sorry. it's the sherry again (or the warm lucky beer chaser). my canadian person costume got an apathetic reception at the toast collective party, but people were drinking enough that at least one of them was willing to overlook my obviously american half-effort to compliment the elegance of my vomiting into the bushes before i headed face forward for my bandmate's couch. still, the general canadian eye was on other mid-fall american high jinks that morning -- or afternoon, in our case, when we finally made it to slickity jim's. the focus article in that saturday's globe and mail was on the election in ohio. "like us or not" was the message i decided to imbue, take and project, but as soon as i was finished with the article i drowned myself in the blurb about the forthcoming book of illustrations by rené gruau, which was set below an almost full page reproduction of an illustration (probably) from the book. dress-up!

we hadn't planned to dress for the occasion when we left for the button event later that evening, but by early the next morning my bandmate and i were changing. at a bus stop in front of the train station, just several blocks from east hastings on main, i was going barefoot. if there weren't any cabs to be had and we were going to have to walk, she wasn't going to have to walk in the heels of those boots. so she went as a clown in my shoes, and i went as a survivor of the zombie/"adventure time"/young professional apocalypse happening on the streets around us, stumbling and laughing through another end of the world. then our third, dressed in a toned down version of the train robber's getup that he'd worn the night before, ran off to steal us the cab with its top light on that was headed into the parking lot of the station across the street. and none too soon. in the short span of the walk to where the robber was holding the car, i knew that i would have had a difficult time making it back to mclean in my costume.

the cab that took me back to the station five hours later had been on duty since just after we'd gone to bed. the underage parties, he told me to my surprise, were the worst. and the driver had another eight hours to go on his shift. i didn't have much time before i needed to catch my bus back to seattle, but i wanted the coffee. so i left the station parking lot and went across the street to the tim hortons on terminal way. give me: coffee. two sugars, two creams. i'd saved just enough of my remaining cash after tipping the cabbie. i should have gotten that book at the radical bookstore, but i really didn't want to carry it. that morning, my backpack was especially heavy, and i had another bag waiting in portland -- plus whatever i added to the load once i got there. so i crammed my great white guilt into my new vintage tote bag and doubled down on my double double. there was room in the tote because i hadn't made it to the cbc shop. and that was fine, i thought, really a very petty worry; that and the customs officer at the border was going to give me trouble as i was.

    

ANOTHER SUITCASE IN ANOTHER HALL

sans purses, packed for maximum efficiency. the white of my blaq backpack looks grubby even in the worst light. it hasn't been to the shower in a while. and it would feel like too much of an imposition to use his body wash on my bag. but by the end of it, the smell of every man jack in the bathroom that fights for attention with the smell of the bedroom on the other side of the hall will be my smell, too. (i won't impose myself on the more expensive shampoo.) my plain, grey travel sweatshirt (which i've become convinced is the mark of fine style this fall) smells like the combination of that dolce & gabbana (the one that reminds me of the dkny i wore in tokyo) and of jo malone orange blossoms, which i've alternated rubbing under the arms and around the collar of the shirt before each of my arrivals and departures. it must be really grubby too, but that doesn't much show away from the pilling that's happening where my backpack rubs it just above my ass. when, on monday morning, two nights after arriving, i first open my notebook to note some things about the weekend, the first thing i write is about the man at madrone on divisadero who was the only person really listening to the tired old new folk duo on the stag, but doing it dressed in my same fall styleway. his beard was shorter, his glasses blacker and his sweatshirt baggier, but he definitely could have passed. we'd gone to the bar to wait for our regular mezzanine table at nopa to open up. we needed hamburgers, and we could wait at madrone, but we weren't going to wait until the late night menu went on offer at zuny. then i write about how i'm wondering why that guy at the bar made my first note, ahead of our drive across the golden gate to marin at four on sunday morning or our ride along the east bay trail later that day...or even our date at the restaurant that night. or ahead of the mugging that we'd avoided on our way to breakfast that morning by just scowling and walking through those three guys in ski masks on hyde street between geary and bush. what fear or displaced priority was it that had me noting that other, almost insignificant man first? on satruday night, i'd happily danced with his friend in her living room at her husband's birthday party; and as he'd said at the donut shop after we'd driven back to the city from the bridge, we must have struck the city as quite the figure in tandem that whole night long (or had, that night, in common parlance, looked undeniably good in pants). all of this true. and after finally visiting city lights and finding the door of the center for the art of translation forestallingly closed (i left the building by the stairway and never signed out at reception), i had some time to think. hard knox. on 3rd. but that's not actually true. i brought him coffee and cookies from piccino first. (they were out of the flower-less orange cake.) then i went to happy hour lunch. time to think. but that's not actually true. i wrote some postcards, too, so my reflection might not have been as deeply probing as it should have been. or at least not inwardly. but after we'd taken the muni away from the only place to be in san francisco (according to travel + leisure) and back to where we'd started (and left off the first time); after our parisian goodbye against the rails; and after the second train ride between the city and the airport that i'd had to pay for as a result of my leaving my clipper card in the wallet i'd left in portland, my airline had the grace to delay my flight and extend me some time. which i used to do a bit of work. and to eat, because the airline had given me a food voucher. to distract myself, like the french guy next to me on the plane from lax who only took his attention away from the video playlist on his phone for heavy breathing, frantic forehead tapping and happily delivered reassurances from me as we'd landed at sfo. (i think he'd thought we were headed into the bay.) get back to work. come back to san francisco? fly, for the moment (and perhaps symbolically), back to portland. it was too late for the train by the time we arrived, so i had the airline write me another voucher for ground transportation. the taxi ride would be at least fifty dollars, i said, and the somewhat welcome delay had nonetheless not been my fault. as it turned out, it was $44.50 for the nearly seventeen miles, plus the one single i had for a tip, which i gave to the rose city driver with my apologies and in exchange for his reassurance that the airline would make sure he got paid. i needed to do the same. had i thought ahead to check the status of my flight before i'd gotten onto the train, i might have been able to stay in the city for another dinner. but there weren't vouchers for that. the time would have been borrowed as it was. it's no big deal, i told the driver, you really can just let me off here. i can find the rest of the way to bed on my own.

SI TÚ ME DICES VEN LO DEJO TODO...PERO DIME VEN

in the early hours of monday morning i dragged myself through the lobby of the hotel to the elevators; and with my face in my phone i missed the man who was sitting next to that other guest in the not so spanish revival armchairs to my left. he had caught wind of her being in the city from down the coast and had come to the hotel to tell her that if she said the word he would drop everything. upstairs, i dropped my phone on the nightstand and fell asleep; and when i woke up my head hurt.

the ladies had remembered to bring ibuprofen, but it was their offer of breakfast and their encouragement over my french toast that got me through the later hours of the morning. yes, i answered readily and sincerely and reminiscently. i'd had a good time. it was worth it, and the headache was enough without adding to it pangs of conscience. but it had all still given way to a morning adventure in depression soundtracked with groans by allie brosh. that sunday feeling. that san francisco feeling. and at noon, the ladies left me in a cab for the airport to spend the rest of my time and that feeling correctly alone.

i thought i should make the most of it, but cindy sherman at the moma was too much. i walked to the mission. i went to taqueria cancún. but i turned right from 19th street to go south down valencia and keep myself from being tempted by the ersatz nostalgia in the mugs at ritual. i wrote my postcards at a different café. a pile of flummery on a dozen pictures of the bay bridge, because i still hadn't seen the golden gate. and i handed it all to a postman walking on duboce between valencia and market. then i found my way around the confusion around the mint, across divisadero and over to haight. the postcards at the booksmith were nicer than the ones i'd bought downtown, but six times as expensive. so i bought just the one for myself, a drawing of a map of folsom and harrison streets between 5th and 8th -- the periphery of the fair and the site of the techie bear picnic.

then it all stopped, before all of it came on again all too quickly. i came out of the book store, looked up and had my breath caught. i'd come, again, and unexpectedly, back to the lighthouse, this time a mexican restaurant. and i took a picture of el faro de san francisco, but it wasn't enough just to send it to the trianera in prague. several weeks earlier, the woman who wouldn't be getting a stolen mug from ritual had sent me a picture of the lighthouse at cabo vilán along with the story of a story. in the story, a middle aged man had, as a child, known an old man who collected photographs of lighthouses. once upon a time, the old man had fixed them. and whenever he finished a fix he took a picture, and on each picture he wrote the adjective which he thought best described each structure. along with the picture and the story of that story (summarized for me from a certain book by albert espinosa), the woman included her explanation of the arrogance of the lighthouse at cabo vilán. so with everything else that i remembered about those other lighthouses that i'd seen, i took a moment and made a decision. exactly because it was crammed in amongst the other shops on haight and didn't have the striking advantage of standing alone, el faro de san francisco was lonely.

i walked, past buena vista park, past alamo square, back toward downtown. and i met him just past six at civic center plaza. we ate ramen, which he had suggested and i had told him i would love. because, i told him, as it had turned out, i wasn't going to get to eat it next month in japan. earlier, he had asked me if there was anything specific i wanted to do or see in san francisco before leaving that night and i'd said no. at the library bar, he asked me why i hadn't said the bridge if i hadn't seen it. and how could i not have seen it? it had, i told him, crossed my mind, but on foot or on public transportation with the three hours we had to spend together i'd thought it imprudent. on the way to his apartment, i told him the story of how i'd told the ladies about my san franciscan walk of shame. even having been its real life hero, he said, he found it hard to believe the retold story itself. and i told him that when i told the story of that night, he would, in fact, have found his zipcar membership card where he looked for it in his wallet in the mood the bar. in that final hour, which, on the twenty-fourth of september 2012, was the first full hour of darkness, we would have driven together to the golden gate.

i could always come back, he said. i could use his apartment as home base. but i would have to promise to pet the cat, and maybe sing to her. i couldn't think of a way to blithely explain the weird claustrophobic loneliness that i always felt when i came to san francisco. or, at the very least, that i always felt when i was leaving. so i promised to sing. "one night only" followed by soft, anguished fandangos, starting with the one that inspired the title for that espinosa book (although that part i didn't share). and back at civic center plaza i ended my open microrelationship with my weekend boyfriend.

on the train to the airport, where all the planes were taking droves of de-harnessed homos away back to all parts, it wasn't better or worse, but it was surely there. for better or for worse. and i would find the city the same again the next time, happily indifferent. and i would sing it to that cat. ay. paquito... si tú me dices ven lo dejo todo. pero dime ven.

"MY MEMORY TRANSLATES EVERYTHING INTO SOMETHING ELSE"

several days of rest (distance, testing, rehabilitation) still weren't enough for me not to feel what i felt at seeing a picture of the skyline of columbus, ohio on the cover of the sunday magazine yesterday. (or maybe they were exactly the amount of time necessary for the inspissation of that foggy sense of terminal disorientation -- and for boring myself into grasping at superficial symmetries.) one week earlier, we'd bought the paper at a market on lexington before having gone next door to have to flee the other clientele at joe coffee. there wasn't anywhere to sit and start the puzzle besides, but neither did we care to find out from the homo visiting from boston whether what he'd just recommended was, "like, a bar or a party" (as the two masc ues travel workout guys sitting across from him had just asked). the tall, beefy blonde behind the counter had laughed when we'd made an indiscreet joke about his other customers at the register just earlier, but we all knew that i wasn't doing myself any favors in making a lucrative marriage with that attitude -- and that those big, hairy arms of his were going to be hugging a big, hairy legacy endowment while i was still dreaming about getting mine (as it were). and that's what they call big city love.

i'd had my day of rest and my ice cream after fornino, and sunday was to be for getting back to business (two days ahead of time with the holiday!), which was probably going to mean just finally making it to the museum (where i really should have gone two days before). it had worked out, however, because she really wanted to see the yayoi kusama exhibition and, in addition to not having been able to go on friday, she had told me that she probably wasn't going to get around to going if she couldn't go with someone else. so we went to the whitney together on sunday after i had gone for a walk with my godson (on again off again weekend boyfriend and former tenant), the toy poodle called francis. i would have helped myself to the magazine if i'd found a copy at verb, but it had taken me long enough just getting coffee and i didn't want to take the extra time to look. we still needed to get bagels, and there would be a line at the bagel place too. but it was worth the second wait, because we had to wait again to get inside the whitney, and we got hungry while we were on line.

she knew kusama for her installations and had bought some books on the artist the last time she was on tour in japan. all of the rest of us liked her because marc jacobs did. the polka dot tentacles in the vuitton display windows, the profile in the paper, reminders (and more reminders) from friends with more self-determined taste, and we all finally made it that sunday. and we made a line. but my friend and i made the line just in time to get behind the woman from queens with four free guest admissions, so we would have to wait, but at least not to pay. and when we had made it through the line and around the second corner, we were standing right in the beeline of the couple of seniors that didn't want to wait until three-twenty to see the (already sold out) kusama installation that required separate admission from the general exhibition on the fourth floor and gave their tickets to us. plus, we had those bagels, which had taken over for friday's vietnamese sandwiches in my purse. not bad.

the exhibition wasn't bad either. kusama was prolific, and of the materials on display at the whitney, perhaps the most interesting were the personal items of kusama's that were on display to document her own documentation of the progress of her career from her youth through the time she spent in new york. the japanese american artist. and in an adjoining room, a slide show of photographs showing kusama dressed in a yukata and carrying a paper parasol as she walked through the city, an evocation of the same juxtaposition that was manifest in the staging of the exhibition itself at a museum dedicated to american art. kusama, as the sensation goes, currently resides in the same japanese psychiatric facility to which she voluntarily committed herself in 1977. her art, in retrospect, has been as much the changes in her process that were forced by the evolution of her social, psychological, geographical and spatial conditions as her output during any specific period -- the last examples of which i think the exhibition would have done well to do without. i think that i could, in one way or another, appreciate either virtuosity or revolution in every room of the exhibition until that last one, and both she and i were happy to leave it quickly behind us and exit to the elevators.   

the waits, i think, were worth it, but especially because the world's current fascination with yayoi kusama did me the favor of introducing me to sharon hayes, a collection of whose "speech acts" was being exhibited one floor down. "i march in the parade of liberty," the poster to the left of the elevators said, "but as long as i love you i am not free." and next to it, a bank of speakers delivered a recording of hayes' speech, the one that she delivered to an absent ex-lover on street corners throughout the city for the "event" described by the poster. i sat and listened to the entire voice over that accompanied a 33 minute film of the 1971 christopher street parade shot by women's liberation cinema and was reminded to remember the inherent politics of fucking. the means of reproduction. filling the park with the indignant contradiction of queer love. and when we left joe coffee and walked to the park to kill time until our time slot for the kusama installation, our indignance at the lack of more protest back at the coffee shop, at the branded reproduction of the liberated but impotent homosexualities of the new century, was so informed. that's how i remember it.

and i remember that the installation was unexpectedly anxiety inducing. we had to wait again, to go in one by one for our one minute each, and inside, although those fireflies on the water were dazzling, they were a lot to take in, and it was hard not to look at ourselves in all of the mirrors, and when we moved to look away into all of the lights in all of the refracted distances it was hard not to be distracted by the movement and not look back at what had caused it (which was us, of course, but each of us alone and in our turn). and in my turn, when my minute was up too quickly (which i knew it would be because i spent the entirety of it waiting for the door to open behind me and catch me off guard, and the waiting to wait before that was what had made us so anxious to begin with), when the minute was up i turned around too quickly on the catwalk and nearly had to grab a fistful of the dangling lights to keep myself from falling into the water, which, of course, wouldn't have kept me from falling into the water and which would have completely destroyed the installation. as it was, the person with the minute after mine was going to experience the fireflies in motion.

yesterday, before i got up to see that there was a picture of us on the cover of the sunday magazine, i'd been telling him about mine and her experience in the park between joe coffee and our escape from manhattan after the anxiety of the kusama installation. her in her shirt and tie and me with my purse with her half of an egg and cheese bagel inside of it. her with her coffee and me with the soda that the tall, beefy blonde had recommended. and all of the sunday tourists looking up at us to smile. because in that moment they realized it was ok, because, apparently, what they hadn't realized was that the dykes and the faggots were dating each other. he said that he'd laughed the first time he'd heard that, when he'd read it in my blog, and i told him sarcastic funny-like with a period after the one laugh in lowercase that the post wasn't written yet, although i might have written it already if i hadn't been wasting my time with him. ha. and whatever, i said, all good writing was just plagiarism with creative punctuation, thinking that i should definitely redact that line from the final version of the story.

"way to go ohio" is what it said over top of the skyline of columbus on the cover of the magazine. but seeing that picture with a different view of the skyline outside and down the street to the south only made me think of new york. and with everyone outside on the street dressed just like in the parade footage from 1971. i march in the parade of liberty, so i wish that to get to the crossword puzzle i wouldn't have to go through this picture. but then, remembering the sharon hayes exhibition that we'd visited one week earlier, i remembered what i'll say i'd forgotten until that morning when i knew i'd have to rewrite this whole thing so that it would be different from the one he'd already read: the big banner that was the thing that had most immediately and viscerally endeared me to the artist. "my memory translates everything into something else," which is to say, in my case, nothing new.