In The London Review of Books, British novelist Hilary Mantel has a review of a new compendium of the paranormal, the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained. It's not really a review, truth be told—how would one review a dictionary of UFOs, witchcraft, and telekinesis, anyway?—but it is a thoughtful and witty examination of the whole idea of the paranormal and how it functions in modern life. Here's my favorite paragraph:
In fact, if you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fayre’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief; it is just as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality. They read the story, or listen to the dead talk in a public hall; two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza. In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture, with its extensive TV spooks programming and Mind-Body-Spirit events held every weekend in sports halls up and down the country: the ineffable now smells of stale sweat and hot feet. An olla podrida of new age hogwash is served up to anyone who has a spare tenner and seems likely to part with it. We are only in the market for fun-size beliefs, unlike the US, where the aggressive fundamentalist irrationality of evangelical Christianity moves real money around, affects how children are educated, and darkens believers’ perceptions of other cultures. On the whole, we have the better part: superstition is easier to accommodate in the body politic than religion. It is less divisive: no one ever went to war about what you should chant when you see a magpie, or was burned at the stake for denying the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.
I have to mildly object that there are plenty of us in the US who are perfectly happy with fun-size beliefs. I'm one of those who doesn't really believe this stuff—not really—but who has been known to drop everything and watch three episodes in a row of The UFO Files on the History Channel. I especially love their little marathons of other countries' Roswells—Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc. There's even, as I recall, an episode about Texas's Roswell—Texas, of course, still being its own country, in spirit if not in actual legal fact anymore. And no, I haven't driven up from Austin to Stephenville to check out the sighting there. Not yet, anyway.
On the other hand, Texas is also where the Texas Education Agency's director of science lost her job because she was perceived as not being "neutral" about evolution. (No word yet on the TEA's stance on gravity and photosynthesis). So perhaps Ms. Mantel has a point.
One of the key scenes in tonight's episode of The Wire was a dramatization of something that's been happening in print newsrooms across the nation for the last several years: the management of the show's fictionalized Baltimore Sun, embodied by the publisher and the editor, call everybody in the newsroom together and announce that the paper's foreign bureaus are being shut down, and that they are making cutbacks in the paper's Baltimore staff as well, mainly through buyouts. Veteran reporters especially are vulnerable, as they are easily replaced with younger, cheaper workers.
And then, as if to underscore just how thrillingly immediate The Wire can be, there's this story, from tomorrow's New York Times, about the editor of the Los Angeles Times being forced out today (Sunday) because he refuses to make more cuts in the news staff. The accompanying photo looks like a still from tonight's episode of The Wire—the same long, wide, low-ceilinged, overlit room, the same balding personnel, all staring at the guy standing a little higher than them and contemplating their futures as he gives them the bad news.
And further entangling this Gordian knot of art and life, all twisted together on the same day, is the fact that the NY Times story about the LA Times references James Carroll, who is a) another former editor of the LA Times who quit rather than make more cuts, and b) the model for one the corporate hatchet men at Simon's fictional Baltimore Sun, according to Mark Bowden's Atlantic article.
Holy metanarrative, Batman (and yeah, there was a Batman reference in tonight's Wire, too). I'm afraid I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find out that Tommy Carcetti really is the mayor of Baltimore.
Nothing's more unseemly in a writer than whining in public about how unfamous and unsuccessful he or she is. You know the drill—often it's disguised as a rant about the sorry state of literary fiction, or about the rampant commercialization of publishing, but the clear subtext (and the real reason for writing the piece in the first place) is, "Why aren't I Jonathan Franzen?" Franzen, of course, being the author of such a piece himself, years ago, in Harper's, where under the guise of bemoaning the fact that ambitious realist novels about Big Themes (specifically his) didn't get the attention they deserved, he was really asking, "Why aren't I Don DeLillo?" Another example was an anonymous piece in Salon a few years back, in which (as I recall) Ms. Anonymous bemoaned the fact that her subsequent novels didn't have the sales of her bestselling first one.
Relax: this isn't a preface to me pulling a Franzen and wondering why world ignores brilliant authors who write novels that mix horror and satire. (Not that I don't whine early and often to my friends; it's just that I'm trying to exercise the minimum of self-control necessary to keep from doing it in public.) Rather, it's just preface to my linking to an interview with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, in the Los Angeles Times. I read the book years ago, and remember it fondly (though not especially clearly), and now I discover it's been a kind of scripture for writers ever since its publication. According to the introduction to the interview (by LA Times staff writer Scott Timberg), the book is a favorite of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Lethem. (We'll overlook the obvious here, namely that Wallace, Smith, and Lethem aren't likely to be whining anytime soon about how unfamous and unsuccessful they are.)
You can read the interview itself to get a sense of what the book's about and why it's important to writers and artists, but mainly, reading the interview this morning, it made me feel better about my relative place in the universe in general, not just the hothouse, pocket universe of American arts and letters. This exchange in particular, between Timberg and Hyde, strikes me as the most sensible thing I've read about the writer's life in a very long time. Timberg is first:
It does seem that artists and novelists have lost some of their distance from the marketplace, some of their disdain for it. We know that Tom Wolfe, for instance, just left his longtime publisher for one that's given him a bigger advance. It seems much more common these days to talk about art and literature with a dollar sign attached. Does this seem different from when you were writing the book in the '70s?
Probably not. I think there's always been a star system that has that kind of element. But the thing to realize when you're talking about a writer like Tom Wolfe is that this is like talking about the very best baseball or basketball players in the world, and there are 100,000 people who are not at that level, who I'm thinking about.
Most of the fiction writers I know struggle to make a living from their writing and have to take second jobs. And for those people it's important to remember that it's not a failure on their part: It's a structural problem that comes with the practice of art.
It's a little alarming that a cultural reporter would assume that Tom Wolfe's experience has anything in common with the average fiction writer's, but Hyde's answer gently sets him straight, telling him something utterly commonsensical, but also something that few people really seem to understand. Even well-read, highly literate people seem to think that the mere fact of having been published puts you in a higher tax bracket, and sometimes it seems like it's only other writers who understand what a dodgy existence the writing life is for the vast majority of writers. The old phrase "shabby genteel" doesn't even come close to describing it. My books have a more exciting social life than I do.
It's Hyde's next remark, though, that I found so reassuring. The sort of article I was talking about at the start of this post is often just an externalization of the writer's own self-laceration. "Why doesn't the world recognize my genius?" is usually just a disguise for "What am I doing wrong?" or "Why am I such a loser?" And Hyde's answer—namely, you're not doing anything wrong, it's how the world treats writers and artists—is oddly reassuring, if only because it makes clear that no matter what you write or how you market it, it's probably not going to make you famous and rich.
I haven't read Hyde's book in 20 years, but as I recall, the main thrust of it is this: a work of art is a gift the artist gives to the world, and the important thing to remember about a gift is that it's something you offer to someone else with no expectation of reward or reciprocation. Out of this, ideally, comes a gift economy, in Hyde's phrase, whereby eventually the artist gets something back without having to ask for it. Or to put it another way: you put your gift out there with no expectation of reward, but sometimes, you get what you need. (Cue the Rolling Stones.) And in Hyde's version of things, what's important is not so much what the individual gets out of the gift economy, but how the community is strengthened by the exchanging and re-exchanging of gifts. (He backs all this up, as I recall, with folk tales and anthropological accounts.) Hyde makes a difference between the eros of a community of gift givers, where wealth is measured in the strength of the bonds between individuals, and the logos of capitalist economy, where wealth is a measurement of how much an individual can hoard.
This is, to say the least, a reassuring account of how artists function in relation to each other and to the community at large. It doesn't always work like this in practice (obviously), and in a writer's darker moments—the day you find used copies of your book selling for a penny on eBay, for example—it isn't necessarily all that reassuring to know that, hey, I'm a member of a community of artists, and we're all more or less in the same boat. But it does lessen the loneliness somewhat to know that the work of art you create all by yourself comes to mean something greater than what you intended when it's shared with other people.
John Marks has a fascinating post about Mark Bowden's Atlantic article about David Simon. John's a journalist as well as a novelist, and his take is vastly more knowledeable than mine.
And David Simon himself writes about his days at the Baltimore Sun in Esquire.
Mark Bowden has an interesting piece about David Simon and The Wire in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Bowden explores the despair and futility that underlie the brilliant storytelling, but then the piece turns into something more ad hominem and less interesting. Now that Simon's taking on big city journalism as well as big city police departments and public education, a number of journalists—tentatively, regretfully, while still expressing their love and admiration for the show—have begun to express some skepticism about Simon and his motives. You can see it in the two guys blogging the show in Slate, and you can see it again in Bowden, and what's unfortunate in both cases is how much their argument depends on an ad hominem judgment of Simon himself, rather than a critique of what he's saying (though there's some of that, too). Which is ironic, because part of what they're accusing him of is being overly ad hominem himself, in his attacks on some of his old editors at the Baltimore Sun. The upshot of Bowden's article seems to be that Bowden considers Simon a brilliant artist who is entitled to say what he likes, however dark, about Baltimore, journalism, the state of the world—unless he says something nasty about one of Bowden's friends, in which case David Simon is a bitter, cynical hack.
Now it's entirely possible, of course, that Simon is a brilliant artist and a complete asshole—he wouldn't be the first—but what interests me more than the personal comments about Simon (or Simon's simultaneously reasonable and prickly response to the Slate discussion) is that Bowden's piece reveals a rather naive understanding of what fiction is and how it works. Take this paragraph, for example:
Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.
Reading the last line of this, my first response was, "Gosh, you say that like it's a bad thing." Maybe it's because I'm a satirist, but being unfair in fiction isn't a dirty little secret, it's an article of faith (see the Kingsley Amis quote in my Commonplace Book, which I wrote out on an index card and taped to my computer monitor while I was writing The Lecturer's Tale). And honestly, I don't think it's just satirists who think this way, I think it's pretty common to most, if not all, fiction writers. Two of my other favorite quotes about writing come from Joan Didion, who said in The White Album that "writers are always selling someone out," and Graham Greene, who wrote that every writer has a little sliver of ice in his heart. I think it's this willingness—no, this eagerness on the part of fiction writers to play unfair, and play it gleefully, that makes professional journalists uncomfortable, especially when one of their own switches sides. To reinforce his point, Bowden gives an example in the next couple of paragraphs:
In a session before a live audience in Baltimore last April, for a local storytelling series called The Stoop, Simon was asked to speak on a topic labeled “My Nemesis.” He began by reciting, by name, some of the people he holds grudges against, going all the way back to grade school. He was being humorous, and the audience was laughing, but anyone who knows him knows that his monologue was, like his fiction, slightly overstated for effect, but basically the truth.
“I keep these names, I treasure them,” he said:
I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head.
Again, in the context of the article, Bowden seems to be quoting this with a feeling of alarm, or at least profound disappointment. But what may seem like an appalling display of bad faith to a journalist is, for a creator of fiction, just another day at the office. Simon sounds just like me here, in an unguarded moment, and like nearly every other fiction writer I know, and it's hard to work up any outrage over it. (My chief response to the passage above was relief that I'm not the only fiftysomething writer who carries forty-year-old grudges. And yeah, I can name names.) In fact, compare what Simon just said with this passage from Orwell, one of the most famous journalist/fiction writers who ever lived, from his essay, "Why I Write," item number one of his famous list of four reasons for being a writer:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
It's not necessary to agree with everything Orwell says here—take it from me, serious writers are every bit as interested in money as journalists, maybe even more so—but the main thrust of this is pretty self-evidently true. Bear in mind that this isn't the only reason to write—Orwell goes in to list three other, less objectionable reasons—and bear in mind as well that I'm not saying that this attitude is admirable. Nobody talks more bullshit about the Nobility of the Narrative Craft than fiction writers do, especially in those moments when they're promoting a book, applying for a grant, or trying to get tenure, so perhaps we have it coming when outsiders (even writers in other genres, like Bowden) are alarmed when we say what we really think in public. The result of our art often is noble, but the making of it isn't, and the plain truth is, writing fiction is like (pardon the cliche) making sausage: readers, even fans, may not want to know about the mixed motives, desperation, bad faith, and just plain mean-spiritedness that invariably, hell, inevitably goes into the creation of even the greatest works of narrative. No one will ever really know, of course, but I'll bet you anything that some of the nastier characters in Shakespeare, especially the ones in the comedies (I'm thinking in particular of poor, pompous, cross-gartered Malvolio in Twelfth Night), represent Shakespeare's mean-spirited and utterly entertaining vengeance on people who pissed him off in real life.
No, it's not fair, and maybe those hapless Baltimore Sun editors David Simon's sticking pins in don't really deserve it. But if you want an artist to be passionate and ambitious and furious about injustice, then you have to live with the fact that some of his fury may slosh over onto people you know and like. Life is unfair and so is art.
The fifth season of The Wire has started, and not a moment too soon. But in a couple of months fans of intelligent, layered, brilliantly plotted, morally complex, politically engaged, and world-encompassing narrative will be faced with a existential dilemma: what do we watch now? From the looks of it, HBO doesn't seem to be planning anything similar—most of the new shows seem to be about unhappy middle-class folks whining to their therapists. Battlestar Galactica, which scratches most of the itches listed above, starts up soon on Sci Fi, but not everyone is willing to make the leap from the drug corners of Baltimore to the Twelve Colonies on the run.
So why not return to The Wire's original inspiration (sez the midlist novelist) and pick up a book? It's a commonplace by now that The Wire is more like a novel than an episodic TV show, and the show's fame has (I hope) introduced many of its viewers to the work of the novelists who write for the show, namely George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price. Price's novels especially were a big inspiration for David Simon and Ed Burns, in particular the drug war epic Clockers. And I noticed in the credits of last night's show that the crime novelist (and David Simon's wife) Laura Lippman had a cameo (I think she was the blond woman in the scene where some journalists at the Baltimore Sun are watching the smoke from a fire in East Baltimore). I haven't read any of her Baltimore-based mystery novels, but they have been very well-reviewed.
It would also be great if all the comparisons of The Wire with the novels of Dickens would lure a few viewers to some of his darker, more ambitious later novels, like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Laura Miller makes an interesting argument that The Wire isn't really like Dickens at all, and while it's true that The Wire is much bleaker and vastly less sentimental than Dickens, I still think the comparison holds, for two reasons. One is that both narratives cut a longitudinal slice through an entire city, from top to bottom, showing us the lives of a vast range of colorful characters. It's not too much of a stretch to see the drug lord Marlo Stansfield as a postmodern (one of David Simon's favorite words) version of Fagin, in that both characters recruit desperate boys to commit crimes. And minus the casual obscenities, you could lift Proposition Joe, name and all, out of The Wire and drop him straight into a Dickens novel. The other reason is that both Dickens and Simon and his writers are motivated by a righteous rage at a system that grinds up the poor. Dickens may goad and hector his readers in a way that Simon doesn't, but there's no mistaking the similar fury in both men.
Simon himself has invoked the playwrights of classical Greece as an influence; he's been quoted in The New Yorker as saying that “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.” It gives this middle-aged midlister (and occasional college professor) a bit of a thrill to think that at least a few viewers might be tempted to read something by Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles after The Wire shuts down. They're not as gritty, of course, and are considerably more sytlized and elemental than The Wire, but they are also (in the right translation) eminently direct and readable. Robert Fagles, whose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey were so celebrated in recent years, has also published some well-regarded translations of Sophocles and Aeschylus.
Simon's idea of fate being embodied by social forces rather than wielded by gods isn't new, of course. Another place viewers might go after there's no more Wire is back to the great social realist novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French novelist Emile Zola wrote from a similar stance, creating dark, complex, HBO-ready stories about ordinary characters made to dance like puppets by social and economic forces. Zola's Rougon-Macquart series of novels follows the effects of the industrial revolution on five generations a family; like The Wire, his novels are large scale, with lots of characters, and full of street slang and carefully observed details (Zola researched his novels like a journalist). I've only read one, Germinal, about a coal miner's strike, but his other masterpieces include Nana, L'Assommoir, and La Bête humaine. If you like Zola, you might also like his American contemporary Frank Norris (who died a month after Zola in 1902, but was 40 years younger), and who left behind at least two memorable realist epics, McTeague, about the rise and fall of a San Francisco dentist, and The Octopus, about the struggle between wheat farmers and a railroad monopoly, a storyline reminiscent of the dockworkers' plotline in season two of The Wire.
There are also the great American realists of the early 20th century, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos. Dreiser, I hope, needs no introduction, but I'll mention An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie for the record. I gather that Lewis is undergoing a bit of a revival after being looked down upon for many years; I read Elmer Gantry, his novel about a shady evangelist, in high school and still remember it pretty vividly. Dos Passos's USA trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money) is sort of modernist lite, with the straight narrative passages interspersed with "newsreel" chapters, basically prose poems concocted from headlines and clips from news stories. As I recall, Dos Passos's trilogy was informed by his Marxism, an ideology which he rejected in later life.
As Simon understood when he hired Pelecanos and Lehane to write for him, a certain type of crime writer also creates narratives in the dark realist tradition, and one of the best is the Scottish writer Denise Mina, who is (along with Louise Welsh, Val McDermid, and others) one of the chief creators of what some people are calling Tartan Noir. I haven't read her earlier trilogy of mysteries yet, but I have read her recent books about the young Glasgow journalist Paddy Meehan, and while the mystery plots themselves are clever, the real appeal of the novels, for me, anyway, is the vivid and exhilerating-in-its-grittiness evocation of Glasgow in the 1980s. Meehan herself is a wonderful creation, a tough young woman from a Catholic family who is struggling to succeed in the almost entirely male, and almost entirely alcoholic, world of Glasgow journalism. The first two Paddy Meehan books are Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, and there's a new one, called The Last Breath in the UK and soon to be released as Slip of the Knife here. After The Wire's over, I may go back and read her Garnethill trilogy, which (so I'm told) has many of the same virtues.
The most Wire-ish recent novel I know of, however, is one I started just last week and am finding entirely engrossing in the same way The Wire is. It's Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, an epic crime saga about cops versus gangsters in contemporary Mumbai (aka Bombay). Chandra's evocation of Mumbai is nearly as thrilling as Simon's Baltimore; there's a detailed description of one cop's kholi (basically, a one-room house where he lives with his wife and two sons) that told me more about everyday life in urban India than any number of documentaries. The cops face the same bureaucratic pressures as Simon's, the criminals as every bit as complex and charismatic, and, it turns out, both cops and criminals in Mumbai are every bit as poetically foul-mouthed as their Baltimore counterparts. There's a very useful glossary, in fact, from which you can learn how to say "motherfucker" in several different South Asian languages (aaiyejhavnaya is one way, if you must know, and maderchod is another). I've only read the first 130 pages, but I'm completely hooked, and it will help me get through the week between each new Wire episode.
And finally, a naked plug for an old Michigan friend of mine, Dean Garrison, who is a crime scene investigator and who has written several self-published crime novels. You can order them at Amazon—his titles are Box Job, Mad Badges, The Blood of Losers, Backstab Blues, and Snowblind Justice—and what they lack in high literary gloss they more than make up for in vividness, verisimilitude, and bitter humor. He's also (just to prove his bona fides) the author of Practical Shooting Scene Investigation, and the closest thing I know personally to a real-life Lester Freamon.
These are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head today; somebody else would probably have a whole different list, and so would I on a different day. But, ten weeks from now, when we're all jonesing like Bubbles in rehab, at least we'll know we have options.
And this just in: Maud Newton, that lucky girl, got to party with the cast of The Wire at the premiere party. What I wouldn't give to have my picture taken with Clarke Peters!
 What you're looking at here is the last picture of me with a talismanic piece of furniture. This cheap old dresser is almost exactly as old as I am. My mother put it together from a kit when she was pregnant with me, in the summer of 1955. For my first year and a half, it was mine alone, until my younger brother, Michael, was born at the end of 1957. Until I went away to college in 1973, I had one side of it, and Mike had the other (I don't remember who had which side). Sometime after college (again, I don't remember when) I inherited the whole thing, and it has accompanied me ever since, to Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Oxford, Ohio (briefly), back to Ann Arbor, and finally to Austin. It hasn't always held underwear and sweaters—during the five years I shared a house with my wife, it stood in the back room and held tools and a lot uncategorizable junk. Then, when I moved out of the house and into the apartment where I still live, it went back to being my dresser again.
It's been falling apart for years, just like I have. It was pretty cheap to begin with, very thin pine panels with only a few nails, and mostly held together with glue. The runners that held up the drawers started coming off years ago, and for most of the time I've owned it—most of my life, in other words—I've had to wrestle the damn drawers back in every single time I've pulled one out. For the last twenty years, at least, I have arranged my clothes in it the same way, shorts in the upper left drawer, t-shirts in the upper right, socks in the second drawer down on the left, etc. The bottom right drawer has always held my camping stuff—hiking socks, compass, binoculars, cook set—and winter clothing—long johns, scarves, gloves. The top of it has always been covered with jars of pennies, keys, my wallet, drifts of movie tickets and ATM receipts, and several generations of clock radios.
About a year and a half ago, when I had an out-of-town visitor coming to stay with me for a week, I got self-conscious about it and spent a couple of hours one afternoon regluing the runners with superglue. Quite the tricky effort, that, since I had to empty all the drawers, put newspaper on the carpet, and then nervously apply the glue, knowing that each time I reattached a runner, I had to get it right the first time, since the glue was so unforgiving. (I got most of them wrong, too, so that sliding the drawers back in was even harder after I "fixed" the runners than it had been before.) I also had to lock my cats out of the bedroom, for obvious reasons, which meant closing my bedroom door, which I'd never done before (it's a small apartment and I live alone). The cats didn't like it much, and the stress of working with that awful glue was compounded by their relentless scratching at the door. And, of course, when I finished, lightheaded with fumes and with a couple of fingers sort of stuck together, I found I couldn't open the door. My apartment is charming, but old, and the ancient doorknob ground all the way around without doing anything. My options at this point were rather limited. The phone, naturally, was on the other side of the door. I was locked in with my computer and could have e-mailed somebody, I suppose, but that just seemed humiliating. I could have pounded on my wall for my neighbor or yelled out the window, but this was back before the Day Job when I was still living as a freelancer (if you can call that living), and none of my neighbors was home during the day. Of course, if life were like the TV shows I grew up with and my cats were not cats but, say, Lassie, I could have shouted through the door, "I'm in trouble, girl! Go get Dad!" But then, life isn't, they weren't, and my dad died a couple years before. Finally (and rather anticlimactically) I remembered that I'd left my hammer and screwdriver in the bathroom (for another bit of preemptive maintenance for my visitor), so I finally released myself by removing the hinges and taking the whole door off. (And have never shut the door since.)
The whole adventure, of course, was mostly pointless, since over the last year or so, all the runners have peeled off again, and it was either reglue them again (which would mean sanding off the glue from the last regluing, not to mention the original glue my mother used, which I probably should have sanded off in the first place and didn't, which is probably why my reglued runners all came off again) (honestly, I'm nobody's idea of a handyman) or get rid of the thing and get a new dresser.
There were three reasons not to. One was I couldn't afford it, not if I wanted to get a new dresser and not some equally temperamental used one from Goodwill. The second is that I come from a family that is congenitally unable to throw anything away. And the third is that, years ago, when I mentioned to my mother over the phone that I was thinking of getting rid of it, she said, "Oh, don't do that! I put that dresser together when I was carrying you, and I've always been afraid that if anything happened to it, something would happen to you." Of course, she once said the same thing about the soap opera As the World Turns, which she started watching when she was pregnant with me, and which she was afraid to stop watching, for fear that my plane would go down in the Amazon or I'd be murdered by my evil twin, or whatever happens to people in soap operas. Now, of course, I'm flashing on the image of my mother as a young woman, hugely pregnant and sweating in an unairconditioned house in Okemos, Michigan, in the summer of 1955, sitting with her legs splayed on the hardwood floor of the living room with the pieces of the dresser spread all around her, and she's lightheaded from the fumes of the mid-50s equivalent of superglue and watching As the World Turns as she pieces the thing together. And now don't I feel like a heel for finally getting rid of the thing.
But hey, she stopped watching As the World Turns years ago, and my evil twin hasn't shown up yet. I even flew over the Andes some years ago and nothing happened (okay, a little cannibalism, but surely the world can spare a soccer player or two). And biology, I'm pretty certain, isn't destiny, so there goes reason number two. And, finally, the tipping point (as the kids say) was that my youngest brother, Tom—who is equally sentimental about old stuff, but never shared a room with me like Mike did, and so has no particular attachment to this particular dresser—gave me a gift card for Ikea for Christmas. (Yeah, you heard me. Ikea. Deal with it.) So now I have a very handsome, new, taller dresser that holds more than the old one did, and whose drawers slide with a touch in and out on little metal wheels in brackets that are screwed, not glued, to the side of the dresser. Even better, since the drawers are new, my t-shirts smell like fresh-cut pine when I put them on. So not only do I have the manly sense of accomplishment that comes from assembling something from an Ikea flatpack (with only a few pieces left over), but I smell like a lumberjack, at least for an hour or two.
Still, I hung onto the old dresser for a few days, mainly because I wanted to wait to put it out until Saturday morning, when people cruising for yard sales drive through my neighborhood. Then, this morning, I didn't get up until nearly ten and almost didn't put it out, thinking it was probably too late to get the yard salers, but finally, I screwed (not glued) my courage to the sticking place and carted the thing down to the edge of my building's parking lot. Because my family is also pretty sentimental about old stuff, even trashy old stuff, I took some pictures of it, and just as I was about to go in, a woman walking her dog passed by and I asked her to take my picture with it. When I told her why I wanted the picture ("My mother made that dresser the year I was born"), she lowered the camera. "Your mother made it?" she said, and her look said, "You heartless bastard." So I hastened to add, "I mean, she assembled it. From a kit. Like Ikea." That seemed to reassure her, and she snapped the picture you see above, wished me a happy New Year, and went on her way. I taped a sign to the dresser that said, in big block letters, "FREE. Needs some regluing, but all the pieces are here." It sat there all afternoon, and I was afraid I'd have to carry it upstairs again in case it rained tonight, but when I came out at 4 this afternoon for my run, it was gone. I don't know who took it—for all I know, it could have been someone in my building, and I'm sitting less than a hundred feet from it right now—but whoever did, whoever you are, use it in good health.
If this were one of those anodyne personal essays you read in the Times sometimes, or hear on NPR, there'd be something meaningful and poignant at this point about middle-age, rites of passage, the legacy of one's parents, Ikea's not so bad, or worse, some faux-Proustian insight about how simple objects are imbued with memory. And lord knows I'm not saying that this post isn't anodyne—it's seventeen hundred words about a fucking dresser—but the essay would use this experience as some smug Life Lesson (and probably be a lot shorter). All I'm saying is, I lived with that thing my whole life, and now it's god knows where. Because what if my mother was right? What if, like that old song, "My Grandfather's Clock," whatever happens to the dresser, happens to me (or vice versa)? Maybe the best case scenario is that stuff happens to the dresser instead of happening to me—The Dresser of Dorian Gray. Either way, now that it's gone, I'll never know. However long I live, and however I go, when I go, it's entirely possible that my last sentimental, superstitious thought will be, "Oh hell. Somebody dumpstered the dresser."
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