Miracle on 34th Street

The boss, for the very first time, acted not as the elderly, cloaked-in-wealth-and-grace and therefore not as elderly as she was, mother-culturemonger figure who adored me from the moment I walked in the door, then planning to write some films and perhaps sell some (though by that time the phrase "making it" was pared down and recombined into something more life-like, though still words, words, I had hoped you would save me from yet another office), but she was terse with me, telling me that I should concentrate on my work and not on the phone converastion I had been on for an obviously long time.  I felt instantly shamed, like I had disappointed my mommy warbucks, who was always kind and never made me feel like an underling, was interested in my thoughts about art, music, the opera....she was the upper west side writ in delicate jewelry and perfectly held hair.  I felt badly for this, as I was on the phone with someone who embodied weakness, and who taught me that a kind and giving heart sometimes bled too much and all over my shoes, dammit.

He was on the rooftop, My rooftop in Astoria - he was desperate, lost, quasi-suicidal as usual but not really (he lacked the backbone)...smoking and looking out from my home, which he had made his, due to his many life failures (he was the sort of person who practically Begged you to tell him to just be a man).  The sad part was, I was never even attracted to him really - we had become close over a set of fantasies about wanting to live as if it was the 70's - Easy Rider, The Band, the seeming freedom that people didn't exhibit anymore - it was the tiniest slice of myself brought out by someone in a moment when I needed to be taken for a ride.  He was never my type - Greek, for starters.  And claimed he was 5'9" but pretty sure he was not.  He lived in delusions....he was Jim Morrison in his mind, so of course life looked pretty hellish (and Astoria too, for that matter) when he was the son of a father who shot himself, and who fancied himself some dark piano playing poet, but really, he was just a scared kid who had an occasional stutter and a nervous eye twitch (and a cocaine problem).  Either way, he was mooching off of me, everything from my home to my food, to my nights and mornings, to my body, which, looking back and slightly off to the side, was barely affected by anything he asked me to do to him.  He was not an aggressor, nor forceful nor even decisive about anything.  Anyway, I guess we all need one we're regretful about.  I'm thankful it's not more than the one.

On that day, he kept me on the phone, "talking him down" but really he just wanted to hear himself talk.  He had no core; and from what I hear still does not.  I remember staying over at his Astoria basement apartment, early in summer, with his friend who I was much more enamoured with.  The former Mormon boy with blue eyes and lips that made me weave as many scenarios as I could about him.  The cowboy kid from out West.  We all three fell asleep in his bed after another of our all night music / drinking hideaways...I was sleeping next to him, as I did for some reason, and felt something around the back of my knees.  A few times, when I woke up, drunk but not hungover as my tolerance was skyrocketing that summer, I looked down and saw the boy, wrapped up in the fetal position around my knees, his face buried in my belly.  Sleeping soundly.  How is it possible to live a life and then feel years after it all that I wouldn't know what to do around those two people, around myself then if I ran into her drunk outside the Irish bar on Ditmars Boulevard....I would tell them both to stop letting the past define you, and to make those artful fantasies your Own and move through the adventure, and stop wallowing in your own selfish disgust.  I don't think they'd like me very much now.  Well, the rooftop phone caller would not; but the Mormon - now married to the chubby Asian girl who wears no makeup because you can't take the Mormon out of the boy, well, he might actually look back on me as that wild, older woman who presented him with some stories when surely he pops a few dozen kids out as his parents did.  I think he may smile a little sideways smile at me, and think still fond thoughts of those racked up, bramshackled times.  I don't work for someone I respect anymore.  And I don't take too many phone calls at work anymore either. 

M. Lucia