| dewy decimal |
2003-06-17 - 7:10 p.m.
When Harold was in the 3rd grade he began reading at an adult level. A year later his mother, my grandmother, would find him researching the Vanderbilt�s, the Rockefellers�society and shit. I remember when I was child, he would bring me the most extraordinary gifts from New York. Cased butterfly collections, obscure African beetles, for me to touch, hold, and to draw, to draw to draw!!!
After 5 years, to at last walk behind the man you have looked to all your life, you feel slow. To have him ask you stupid questions like, �So how was your flight?� is insulting. To be unable to understand why he, the fashion curator of the Met, wears such large shirts is humbling. He opens 5,000 doors and closes them politely in your face. You walk faster, and your youth exhausts you.
This man was the catalyst for me to come out of the closet. On the day of my grandmother�s funeral he revealed a collection of short stories about his life. Mostly about finding courage in the context of growing up in a provincial town. To be different, to feel like an outsider, and to reconcile these things. That day of the funeral he opened 5,000 doors. Did not shut them. I�ve learned to open a handful since.
Through him I have gained an incredible amount of insight. But there are things about him I disagree with, which is not important. The man gauges authority by these factors, necessarily in conjunction with one another�ambition, intelligence, money, charisma�this is how you assign value. On a bus ride up Lexington I realize that I am in a very big pond. I am the small fish, I�m talking �the germ on the back of a tick on the balls of a dog licking his fucking ass� small.
Consolidate your horrors. Concentrate all your dreams. Exponentially increase the personalities and make them hungry. Let people walk into the middle of active streets, waiting for their walk signs. Walk till your legs become sinewy and fatigued. Go underground and emerge under even older profiles. You will have found that you have brought yourself to the most extraordinary place.
My sister walks down the streets in her flip flops, amazingly indifferent to the infinite and vast plane of shoes that surround her. She strides past the amazing Francis Bacon piece in them, dreaming of Haleiwa. She trivializes the masters of civilization, part of my mind cheers for her, another part is fucking annoyed.
Mom and Dad drag miserably behind us despite their efforts. I look at my mother in her beat up old sweater and her cheapo generic walking shoes. Her hair is ruptured. She looks pathetic and I feel how strongly I love her. My mother who has never placed any importance on material things, whose self-sacrifice is so immeasurably inexhaustible, she makes me proud and helps me to understand things that some people will find impossible to learn.
In Manhattan you are constantly between things. My dad who was also dreaming of the Northshore did not like this. To be flushed against all things kinetic. What was a romance for me was like date rape for Dad.
Later in the evenings we would meet Uncle Harold again. His apartment on the upper East side is small and incredible. It is pale and high. Again books pile themselves upon one another. Maybe they�d impress you. Maybe you�d think that assholes lived here. Classical portraits, expensive furniture, a grand piano weighed the already heavy inventory in my head. It was so much but it made too much sense. Refined. Tested. Extraordinary. Unchallenging. Upon entering I handed my ultra suede coat to Uncle Harold. I felt embarrassed, of the ultra-fauxness of it, then I became embarrasses for being embarrassed. I forgot to be punk and I would have to forgive myself immediately.
His two Chinese Cresteds, Suchyan and Lapsang, jingled around my feet. Hair on their legs and head, but none on their bodies. I thought that they were manicured that way but apparently during adolescence it all falls off. The peach fuzz and freckles that did cover their body reminded me of my uncle Bobby�s sun-spotted back from years of fishing. They were actually kinda precious, fluttering anxiously on the priceless rug.
We took pictures in the immaculate space and I think even Mom allowed herself a second to imagine what it feels like to be a millionaire because for a second I think I saw her blush.