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Lyz Lenz
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They wanted me to say they are the exception to the rules. But I don’t know this. I don’t know their hearts or their deeds. I don’t know the socks they leave on the floor or the sex they refuse to give. But more important, I don’t want to be the arbiter of someone’s morality. I think of my father saying about my mother how she was so good, the best one out of the two of them. Better than he deserved. And I think of her brittle goodness in the face of their volatile marriage. I do not want this. I do not want a life so rigid and righteous that it has no room for my own failings and humanity. What I wanted was to be as fully human as these men are. Not to push the stone of moral goodness up a hill day after day.
After the party, she’s wine drunk, and we are sitting on the back porch of her beautiful home. We told her husband we were going for a walk.
“Sure, leave! Don’t worry about cleaning up,” he said brightly. “This is why I pay people, to do all of this. So, sure, walk!”
I am afraid of him. I’m afraid of his forceful sarcasm and his beautiful home. So we do not go for a walk. Instead, we sit on the porch, and she cries. She tells me that she can never leave all this. It’s too much.
He comes out to check on us. “You still writing feminist drivel?” he asks and laughs at his own good humor.
“Yes,” I say. “There is a huge market for it.”
He walks away, and she cries more. I tell her leaving is the hardest part. We sit in silence staring out at her backyard. The pool is covered for the winter, and it looks like a black eye in the middle of the beautiful green lawn.
I once lamented to my friends in a group chat that I missed dating someone because I missed having someone who was forced to try new restaurants with me, or a standing lunch date to keep me, an extroverted writer, from losing my mind when I’ve been working alone too long. My friend pointed out that I didn’t have that when I was married and that I could just ask friends to fulfill this role for me. What you are looking for is companionship, she told me; you can get that from a good friend.
Rebuilding the ties of community is essential for combating loneliness and not just for divorced women, but for everyone. Author and academic Anne Helen Petersen has written extensively about the need for community and how building it requires humility. “It requires bravery, and vulnerability, and intermittent tolerance for people being annoying, and practice. Like, you just have to keep doing it, and doing it, and eventually it just feels like the thing you do, the people you’re near, the community you’re a part of. So many people have lost this skill or never had it modeled for them in the first place—and, depending on your identity, you may occupy spaces that are actively hostile to its development. (White bourgeois America is one of those spaces!)”
Community is a practice. And you have to ask for what you need. And keep asking. And if people do not give it to you, you have to find a way to take it. You do not have to settle for the life you were told you should want. You do not have to settle for good enough if good enough requires you to sacrifice your hopes and dreams. You do not have to be a martyr. You can fight for your happiness through whatever means necessary. It will not always involve breaking your life apart. But if it does, you do not have to be afraid. You can Thelma and Louise yourself right off that cliff.
[...] It’s not about the music any more, Johnny said. Well, what the fuck is it about? Like I said, I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because, for a moment, even when everything seemed impossible, everybody was doing everything, reading, listening, writing, creating, sticking up posters, taking notes, passing out, throwing up, rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing in dark windowless rooms at 2 p.m. like the future was just up ahead and we better be ready for it. And now already it’s the rotten past. That’s why I did it, if you want to know the truth.
We cottoned on early that there were certain bars that the musicians liked to hang out in and certain cafes too but most of them are long gone so it would be pointless to tell you about them and heartbreaking too, the booths with the torn leather seats, the shakers stopped up with damp clusters of salt, the chipped Formica tables, all vanquished in favour of faceless coffee shops full of idiot middle-class couples and pregnant mums. On Saturday evenings, after lying around in Johnny’s living room playing our latest purchases – The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu or Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, which still sounds perverse and macabre, like a suicide note where you’re not sure whether it’s a joke or it’s for real – we would head out to one of the bars and mooch around and scope the scene. Occasionally we would bump into Big Patty and we’d both feign surprise, wow, what are you doing here, we hang out here all the time, etc. It got to the point that we struck up a real friendship, which at first was exciting. I’m in, I thought, bohemia here I come.
[...] But it ended up where I was going to these … clubs … these … bunkers … really these fallout shelters … because that’s what it felt like … I’d be sitting in the dark watching this punk group … going through the motions … acting gobby … playing three chords … staggering through a bunch of songs that really they had rehearsed to death … There was no spontaneity to it … no reality … no life … and that’s when I began to think … Christ … we’ve dug these complexes … deep into the ground … we’ve built walls … we’ve filled in all the windows … we’ve painted the toilets black … we’ve drunk ourselves to the point of oblivion … just to keep life outside … Art was supposed to open you up to life and here we were … we had narrowed it to the point of a fucking black box … with a bunch of dirty mirrors lining the walls …
I would say that Mary was in about fifty per cent of the best groups to come out of Airdrie in the middle 1980s. She was certainly in demand. At first some people speculated that she was a lesbian. But it was more that she was just aloof. How did I meet her? Well, I am glad you asked that question because that is another story and in fact it has nothing to do with music. It was the first summer after I graduated from high school. I was seventeen years old. It was the kind of summer that we simply do not get any more. I swear to god that the tar was melting in the streets. People were swimming in rivers. These filthy rivers. These stinky summer rivers. But even so. I took a job at a cement factory in Coatdyke. I worked on the desk, which was no work at all, lucky me. You do not get a lot of drop-in customers looking for bags of cement. Although of course you do get a few. It was normally people that had just bought their council house and were looking to build an extension, or freelance labourers. We dealt a lot with the trade.
[...] I would be coming home depressed and of course even these kinds of issues were anathema to Mary, she was one of those people who would just create without a second thought. At this point I had a flat in town. A bedsit with a bed built up on legs and underneath it a workspace where I would paint and eat and I had a small black-and-white TV set up. Mary would never sleep. My best memories are of lying in bed after we had made love and of listening to her down below, painting or writing, she was always writing in her journal, and all the time she would have the TV on low, late-night monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came from Outer Space, and I could smell the smoke from her cigarettes rising up and soaking through the mattress combined with the smell of her hairspray. [...]
i just like this picture
What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).
cute
[...] she was an artist, that’s how she saw herself, an artist that used sex and her body and gender and stuff like that – though she never talked about it in those kinds of terms, that wasn’t her style – and so early on we began doing music together where we would record ourselves having sex, she would get into the zone, there would come a point where she was so turned on, you can hear the moment it clicks on the tape when the voice would come out, this new voice, this automatic kind of voice, not always using words but sometimes, words that you wouldn’t expect, words like exhibition and tournament and procession, words that always seemed too long to suit a gasp of passion or an orgasm, words like calculation and expression and verification, sexy words, it seems to me even now and back then, my god, it was all I could do not to blow my load as soon as she began talking these words, these magic words that were like passwords to a whole other kingdom of passion, on her knees in front of me, sometimes with a single thin silver belt tied around her waist and a pair of heels, those eyelashes curling up, nothing else, and next to my penis a microphone so you never knew which one she was going to suck and which one she was going to talk into [...]
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