Wyatt Frank
A Writer's Evolution December, 2016 Going in Circles Slimy? A girl called me “slimy” the other day, and she doesn’t even know me… It actually happened twice. The first time, a friend of a friend came over to our apartment on Tappan Avenue, on the concrete corner of Oakland. I didn’t really like my roommate back then (this was around a year ago) because he was so obviously self interested -- an aspiring entrepreneur who’ll do anything for money, but whose smile seems to make people think he’s a nice guy. Anyways, our relationship was and remains amicable because that’s what’s best for roommate relationships. He knows I don’t respect or like him, because I make that clear when I don’t appreciate him, but we still operate as friends when in the house. I’m getting on tangent here, but understand that I find it important to make my principles clear, partly because I think they do a good job defining me, and partly because I need to remind myself probably, outwardly, that these are my principles and this is how you should define me. So he invited a friend over for a quick smoke of weed -- something I rarely do, and certainly not with my roommate. She comes in and immediately, before saying hello to me, starts rambling on to Eric about some stressful situation between her and her housemates: they’re all passive aggressive, they all make a mess, they all hate each other but for some reason they’re best friends. They go out onto the terrace to have a smoke and after a couple minutes, I go out to join them, saying hello to Eric’s friend and trying to make conversation. One week later and Eric, in passing, says to me: “Oh yea, dude! My friend thought you were so slimy!” What? And as much as I couldn’t give the slightest shit about Eric or his friend (or the many of his friends who would come over, not say hello, and probably talk shit about me later on for introducing myself and asking about them) this really irked me. I’m a smart guy. I have principles, although I used to be pretty “slimy” or some variation of whatever that means to people when they say it -- mischievous, self-minded, promiscuous, they certainly don’t know me well enough to make up that judgement of me. I’ve been trying to live a life slime-free, but here we are. Before I tell you about the second and more recent time I’ve been called “slimy”, let me tell you a story of my youth -- as told in an essay I wrote last year. Principled. “My grandfather, a judge, and my grandmother, a lifelong church activist and saleswoman, moved into Chelsea, Manhattan, in the 1950s and never left. I was born in 1995 and raised on the same street in the same middle-income housing development in Chelsea that my grandparents moved into, same as my mother, and so my identity revolved around that neighborhood, through blood and friendships. Through my childhood, however, it was never really about the community that I cared, it was about those individuals with whom I could escape the community. The old ladies who organized events in the neighborhood, the badgering white men in the suits, the teachers, the parents, they were the ones my best friends and I had avoided as kids. I found my friends, early on, and developed close relationships with boys in the neighborhood who, like me, were smart but mischievous. By the time I was a teenager, I had shared some intimate memories with my best friends, Chelsea’s “OG Three,” composed of my friends Clarkson, Marlin and myself… “Clarkson and I met at the park outside my apartment building when we were young children, in the year 2006. I saw him setting up to WWE choke slam a smaller boy, and so I went up to him and asked, “hey, double choke slam?” “Clarkson and Marlin lost their virginities together to a girl named Hellary in the staircase leading up to Clarkson’s roof in the summer of 2012, Marlin's sophomore year of high school, and Clarkson’s junior year. In a big city, a crowded neighborhood made finding spots to be alone difficult, and that staircase became a coveted spot for us to go and escape parents and community members who recognized us. Throughout high school we would smoke weed there, invite girls there, and just pass time together playing music and cracking jokes, escaping the adult world to be kids by ourselves. The neighborhood meant nooks of space where there was little adult influence or oversight on our actions. These were the blacktop, in the stairs, on the roof, at parties, and at sleepovers. At warehouse parties, the river piers at night, at McDonald’s, the basketball court, the football field in the Projects... any place away from grandparents, parents, family friends, and neighbors. “For parents and neighbors, we were smiling and sweet boys, but after school and on weekends, like many kids in the city, we were mischievous and free. Parties, girls, blunts, fights, basketball. Years away from some of those experiences, I was embarrassed of them, sure, but I was proud of the friendships I had sustained.” I know the difference between a smile and character; the difference between someone who knows how they should act and someone who acts, good or bad, honestly to what they believe -- following their principles. I was a mischievous kid in New York City once, so I know. Now I’ll tell you the second time I got called slimy. Two midwestern girls, friends of mine from the student organization for which I founded the chapter on campus -- Students Helping Honduras -- tell me that because I’m from New York and because of the way I act: “sharp, aggressive sometimes… or the way you talk to women jokingly” I’m slimy. They didn’t know me 5 years ago, and they don’t know my friends at home in the city now. And when Eric comes around to open a door for them and smiles charmingly, he is “a nice midwestern boy.” Bullshit, but they can think what they want. I do care though, and deeply. I just don’t really understand why… * * * You ever stress over the fact that your memories, your favorite ones, aren’t totally true to what happened, and that they’ll dissipate over time, until really just the essential details of what either happened or what we wish to believe happened remains? * * * In my junior year of college, I was faced with a generic assignment for an essay: Write about an experiment. So, having to choose one topic out of all the options in the world, I chose meditation as my experiment. I started off the essay like this: “In this moment, sitting on a plane heading back home to New York, I can see myself in a daydream. I am floating; floating gently above the peak of a flowered mountaintop, my eyes closed in concentration. I am dressed in white robes that drift subtly as the wind beneath me. My legs are crossed, let’s say, and my palms, they sit calmly upon the soft cushions of my knees, facing upwards toward the sunny heavens. Below me is a lunch interview with a new boss, summer classes, college graduation. Below me lies my future. A blazing sun warms my closed eyelids though already there is a warmth that has emanated from within me, a presentness that keeps me afloat.” Lies. I sat on that plane on the way back to New York probably listening to Drake, albeit thinking about my future. But I couldn’t encapsulate this in an interesting way without exaggerating -- without finding some juice to suck out of otherwise normal several hours on a plane. But it doesn’t matter; if I think about it now, I kinda believe it happened that way, some fantastic daydream and a revelation of the spirit. And I’m not a liar, but I’ve been in the past when it best suited me. I lied to my mom once as a kid. I told her I’d read the whole chapter of this book for homework, and even made up the whole thing for her when she pressed me. I also cheated on my first serious girlfriend. I never told my girlfriend and we had a bittersweet breakup as we split up ahead of college. Writing an exaggeration, not a lie, in order to create a better experience for the reader is better though, no? Slimy? I cheated on my first girlfriend twice, actually. Part of me was ashamed, the other part was almost proud for having gotten away with it. I never cheated again, not on another girlfriend. I might have come close once, but I think Clarkson stopped me. Clarkson then proceeded to cheat on his girlfriend nine times. I continue to exaggerate and sometimes act mischievously in my writing -- leaving out some details to accentuate others, creating feelings or experiences that didn’t exactly happen the way I depict -- but that comes with the territory. Writing, as we are, cannot be a direct and objective representation of us or our experiences. It can only be a sliver. Slivers. Slivers: what I call those little bits of experience we are able to capture in writing. ‘Cause if our writing is founded in what we experience, it can only ever originate from just a sliver of what we perceive. Other people seem to hype up writing for all that it is when despite their claims, there is so much that it isn’t and never will be. Kind of like how we hype up people we look up to -- people are great, or can be, but nobody is perfect. Writing, like perceptions of us, are conceived out of just a narrow sliver of what we think, what we have learned, what we have experienced. Those things we choose to write about and think about, they are just only ever momentarily finished products, as are we. Right? Maybe slivers represent, at their core, the themes in our lives that linger. Cheating, lying, sliminess. Are these themes imposed on me by external sources, or are they who I am deep down? These things aren’t inaccurate, but they are incomplete; they don’t tell the whole story, but they’re also not wrong. Before getting placed into our first year writing course in college, everyone had to write an essay in order to get placed in a class. I wrote about cheating. It was a pretty shitty essay, full of bold claims about a society that cheats and school systems rigged to be numbers games. I wrote, “Many aspects of our society come together to create traditions of stress and competition, culminating in an unfortunate culture of cheating. From role models’ influences to the age old schooling system of teaching towards a test and pressuring students to get into deemed ‘good’ colleges, students are bombarded throughout their lives with too much work to handle and too little ethical guidance.” I was never a cheater, really. Except once in a game of Monopoly, but my sister found me out and tattled on me. Thank you, Sabrina. But all of that angst toward a society for its cheating ways -- for those shitty role models and shitty culture of cheaters teaching cheaters to cheat until nothing matters because the rules have been totally and completely undermined, undervalued. Maybe I felt as though in doing the right thing, in not cheating, I was being undervalued. I still feel that way. The summer before I wrote that essay about meditation was the summer my grandma, Emmy, passed away. I remember sitting on her balcony and looking out over hers, now my neighborhood from 21 stories up, reclining into the director’s chair she always used to sit in, legs crossed as she would compliment my job painting the legs of her balcony tables, or cleaning the old, green fake-grass carpet that covered it. I just sat there for hours, still as her flowers, and listening on repeat to River by Leon Bridges and trying to think of something to write in a speech for her funeral. I could think of nothing at the moment and for days after that could really sum up our relationship for the others who would be there; I could put together no speech that could be wholesome or encompassing enough of our time together to do justice for her. I sat there until the sun went down and my hand ached from scribbling ideas, until my fingers and my pen just couldn’t keep up. So I didn’t speak at her funeral. Months later in the pages of this essay on meditation, however, I found a few words. “Emmy died of emphysema in the summer of 2015. Hospice had her taking an assortment of medicines every day to keep her alive and her body from not totally degenerating. The caveat was that her body would give up on her anyways, sometimes in excruciating and confusing ways. Her body became skinny, her skin became webbed and swollen around her wrists, and her speaking sometimes slurred as her thoughts became less clear. I spent every moment I could with her before she was gone, and in those moments there was no place to be but in the present, because nothing else mattered. When she sputtered and her words became more senile, my vision would sometimes blur with the dizziness of the moment; this surreal reality of a loved one dying slowly before you, in moments and steps. In moments more important than all else, we learn the most, and when she died, that brightly painted living room we had spent so much time in, engulfed in each other's’ presence became a lasting image in my mind. The apartment was emptied and sold, but those memories with her remain vivid and distinct…” I won’t say it does the whole lived experience -- and thus -- any justice. I still couldn't provide a holistic representation, but this was the first time I had typed anything up of my experience during that time. It provided a memento of our time together, encapsulated on a Google drive file and bound to the archives of my professor’s files. But this essay was something of a breakthrough for me in my writing, as in my sense of self. It made me want to write more about things that had irked me, things that compelled me but which I couldn’t understand. Things which I couldn’t deny were accurate, true in moments, but which formed a caricature too simple and too one sided to represent me. Slimy is a straw man; a scarecrow. But then, after my grandfather, Emmy’s husband for more than 50 years, my mom’s dad, Roro died, my mom told me about his concentric circles of obligation: Family, Friends, Neighborhood. Simple. And suddenly, a new, important theme in my life. In these last two years since Emmy died I’ve started writing about my family, my relationships with friends, the neighborhood. I imagine myself like Emmy and Roro as I write as in life, cutting out the bullshit and focusing on what suddenly matters to me, one sliver at a time. There’s bullshit that can’t be avoided. AIDS ripped us apart in an oral history once. “At one point I started using drugs, once I knew my life was going to be saved, I had a drug and alcohol problem, which I’ve gotten help for… it was a war out there.” The neighborhood is gentrified in a journalistic exposé. “There is a cyclicality to lifestyles in the projects that does not exist in the areas surrounding it. It is day-to-day and generational, as life is dictated more by necessity than leisure.” Housing policy is outdated, ineffective! “homelessness has continued to increase…. This must be treated as an effect of skyrocketing market values on rent... aggravated by state legislators’ inability to adjust affordable housing regulations within 421a... The city has done far more to pay rich people to build apartments in the city than it has to keep the middle and lower classes secure in their homes…” My beloved (other, still living) grandfather is out of touch because of: An unexpected, uncharacteristic[?] will dispute. These moments and the bullshit redefine your circles; they redefine your roles within them. Bullshit helps you understand that moments do not have to define us because we can more easily define them. I began choosing the other side of the picture to focus on until one was more believable than the other, but still no more complete. Last year, my other roommate had been smoking every night, telling me he did it to relieve his anxiety. My anxiety was building as well due to the death of my grandmother (other side of the family, after Emmy died) and an ensuing unexpected will dispute that put me out of contact with my grandfather, Polly. I had to write an essay for class that compared an object to an idea. I chose cigarettes as the object and figured the idea would just come through the writing process. When the idea came to write about cigarettes it was unexpected -- but so was the fact that I was smoking cigarettes at all: “Like tough conversations, cigarettes usually have filters. Soft white tissue is found at the base of most all cigarettes since the mid 20th Century, there to filter out some of the toxins and other things that come down the rod. Filters serve to soften the intake of abrasive materials. They serve to make more appealing and ingestible that which is otherwise harder to take in. They begin white but by the end of the cigarette, the filter is a musty looking brown. An indicator of what was not ingested, but in the end, just as much an indicator of what was.” Each part of the cigarette, filter included, became an artistic representation of my experiences. This was another parallel to my life that I was fabricating, but it felt real and it felt sincere. It was a simplification of things, a tying together of loose ends in my life, comparing one cancerous object to the cancerous realizations of a life experience too broad and complicated otherwise to put into words. Each part of the cigarette is not the complete object in itself. Each image painted is accurate though, and tells its own story of the whole; accurate observations are wholly dependant on the complete picture. The filter is important but only because of what toxins it serves to filter. “When I hung up this time with Polly, something seemed different. I began to dream about him. In my dreams, I was minimized to a thirteen year old boy, a son of a man diagnosed with something bad and uncertain. I can see myself as a kid, holding Polly’s hand at the park next to their house in Long Island, looking up to him as he smiles back down on me. He smokes a big cigarette in this dream, the dark embers spitting out of the tip and falling toward me like flaming rocks. He wants to put it down and quit again, but this time he can’t.” Family was turning on each other. Friendships, community, now disjointed after years of harmony so far as I could tell. But still, no dissolution of the circles. “The ember is all the way receded now, and I can barely pinch on as it burns through the filter. I take my last puff, my lips turn to smoke and the cigarette falls forever.” My grandfather ain’t perfect. Neither am I. That’s OK. Memories are not just encapsulated, they are preserved and reimagined. Those lessons gleaned from important slivers of memory are mine to hold onto, for applying to new situations and for better understanding myself. And those character traits I wish to have, I live to emulate, those are mine to hold onto as well. The ember is all the way receded now, and I can barely pinch on as it burns through the filter. I take my last puff, my lips turn to smoke and the bullshit falls forever. I did smoke a cigarette after that, but I then seriously dropped them forever. Cheating on my girlfriend is an experience that made me. Smoking weed in project staircases too. But they don’t define me today, and neither can girls I don’t know who call me “slimy.” Slimy is not the complete image. I am incomplete, too. So I dropped Eric. But those girls remain my friends. We talked. Words are words. Circles are circles. We all have our demons. If we live life in the moment, if we cut out the bullshit of the broader picture, we can elevate, like smoke, like we have wings, soaring high, missing the forest and the trees, into the clouds, above mountain-tops, but not meditating, always moving, always forward, always surrounded by those we love and care about, always focusing on those moments that make us. Focusing on those moments, those vibes, those slivers; break through the slime, the smokescreen, create an image that is incomplete but not inaccurate. Accurate and not yet complete. Moments don’t make us. Until the next come along. * * *Annotated Bibliography for A Writer's Evolution |