School days at Thomas Dale High School down the street on W. Hundred Blvd. I see other schools everywhere and I fantasize abdout being a kid that attends, walks home from school, exits those double doors at 2:30 pm with my backback on shoulder, what will I do with my afternoon? And will I see any of my classmates? The future is ahead and I dream and I barely know who I am. I know what kind of music I like and what I'm keeping my eyes peeled for when I comb the racks at the thrift store and I think that's enough to determine myself. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I might not be and it's Friday. Will I spend the night with a friend or what will I do? Walk home in silence, or with my headphones on blasting moody music like Tears For Fears first album. ... Boy that doesn't make a whole ton of difference from how I m now. Only, I can really do anything and pretty much decisions are all mine to make. Unless say it involves moneys I do not have. And I can yell at strangers and officials and they might care. We really all are just backpack dragging kids getting out of school on a Friday afternoon.
Mom, Dad, and I starting our drive down to Fayetteville, North Carolina to see aunt Sherry . Not 15 minutes before mom hollers when a rock hits the windshield. Her reactions man. As bad as Maddy yelling at the moon or a cute animal. "I'm a bad passenger" she says. A white PT Cruiser drives by covered in red Hatchet Man stickers. Giant ones. Dad plays U2 on the stereo, says it reminds him of driving down to Alabama. Dad forgets the caramel cremes he bought. Popping those things at all hours across the country, though on a drive like that... time doesn't really exist like you might think.
The smell of grass. Welcome to Virginia rest stop.
6:11PM - Cocktail sauce. Frozen shrimps at Sherry's house in Fayetteville North Carolina. Talks of her jobs in the airforce at Ft. Hope. Mom remembers playing with barbies in the grass outside the window of Grandma Diana's hopsital bedroom. I guess 1959. A military base and perhaps she, being a kid wasn't aloud in the hospital. Grandma Diana one crazy lady with lots of class. They wish we could have met her. She recalls sneaking into Diana's room a little drunk with a cousin. Diana was in and out being treated for Polycethemia Vera a rare blood disease with kumiten. In the end it did her more harm than good. Deteriorating her veins and she hemorrhaged right through them. Sherry is suffering from PSV as well. They say Grandma was a Guinea pig for so much of that kind of treatment. Mom talks of a letter grandma wrote her after one Christmas saying she didn't think she would see another Christmas because she refused to be cut into again. They wanted to go into her jugular vein.
Sherry was "goth" even before goth existed. Black clothes, black hair, dark dark dark and pale. These southern women. I love them. I truly feel robbed of Diana, and am sad for it. People die, and I am sorry. I probably would have loved her. But the way they all describe her, I see a lot of her in all of them anyway. Crazy, elegant, I can imagine. Aunt Barbara. Man I wish I had more of her spunky-ness in my life. Mom often recalls the story of Grandma Diana, and Eleanor maybe it was Sherry, chasing after each other with fly swaters. Tray, Sherry's husband talks dad's ear off about fishing.
10:05 - Mom and Sherry at the dinner table. Mom has had a lot of wine. You can definitely hear it in her voice. I hope she doesn't have an insane headache in the morning. Her excuse is she doesn't have the opportunity to spend time with a Banning who is so much like her. Sherry, more alike to her than Julia. Mom and her look up on Sherry's ipad trying to figure out where Hank Williams Sr. Is from. Somewhere near Andalusia, the Alabama town where they both spent so much time growing up. I brought him up trying to describe the only type of country music I like. Older country. I guess Elba, Alabama, our first home in Alabama, claimed it was home to Hank Williams originally.
11:50 P - Just finished Patti Smith's book "Just Kids". It's one of the greatest non-fiction stories I've ever read. Maybe greatest stories period. It isn't hard to understand how she could resonate with so many people who found it in themselves to recommend it to me and to Maddy. I really know a lot of people who talk of reading it. But this copy is Maddy's and it was given to her by Caitlin wife of Albert, mother of Gem. Caitlin first brought it up to us at that Broken River Festival at Whiskey Island over the summer. As we broke down the Path Cafe tent for whatever reason she brought up Patti Smith. I probably said I didn't I didn't know of the book and wasn't familiar with her music. She said we would like the book how maybe we made her think of the book. In after reading it, that is a nice thought. That silly Maddy and I in our sweaty lost movements with heads in other places in shabby thrift store outfits on a Sunday afternoon would invoke a reminder of somebody with this story to tell. And with this brilliant way of telling it. She makes me dream. She makes me look at myself and my life, it's 22 years and be happy and thankful that I've found the means to do anything I've done, and to have dreams of creating more. People once told me after one of the bands shows maybe the one in Baltimore, I can't remember to the location, it was a girl though that I reminded her of Patti Smith, that really didn't mean much to me then, but in retrospect, now I'd say it's a pretty cool thing. Not that I want to in particular remind people of anyone but myself, to be anybody but myself. But in a world where any art is critiqued in reference to art of the past, I'm going to bask in a moment like that. Especially saying as how it couldn't have been my looks.. Because Miss Smith and I don't share any physical likeness. It's in her celebration of her past that I really enjoy and relate. I don't have the same story, or experience but I can still be moved by her words, and by her love and devotion to another human being, to "write their story" it is the greatest love story that could be written. The greatest love is understanding I think, and her and Robert Mappelthorpe seemed to have a great deal of it. My notebooks, my habit and practice of filling them up is to continue my love story to the world. If I could ever give a gift. It is this record of one life, of my life, the simple act of writing it down, even if I am the only eyes it's made for. My understanding, my love story to the world.
You see my favorite part of the story she tells is embodied in this necklace. This Persian violet bead necklace she first seees/watches over in a glass case in the Brentano's bookstore she works at. Then she recognizes the curly haired Mappelthorpe from a boy she spotted in a bed in an apartment where she sought out friends of hers weeks prior. He has a credit slip and points out the Persian Necklace bound on black and silver cloth. He buys it and she says "Don't give it to any girl but me." And there it is. It's spelled out. Maybe in the wells of her memory it's all so much more dramatic and layered but we have what she has written for us and that is the most spellbinding and consuming story. Involving a life shared and filled with symbols, art, love, confusion, hunger, lonliness, fear and wonder. But man, this moment. " I won't." He says . It's as if two people were ever meant to be together and they were those 2 people. In a glance, an exchange of a trinket wrapped in tissue, hand to hand in a couple of words and a smile, the love sparked and was fueled forever. The greatest love of all, understanding. For they did not end up together as in your traditional bedtime story happy ending. They were together, and that was it. Together in your mind, so like many things. Mappelthorpe dies, but their pursuit together, the things two people can share in the middle of the night, in creation they bonded themselves in an eternity of love and understanding, unforgiving, unbreakable. With a necklace that she ends her story on. This exotic Talisman wrapped in faded purple delicate tissue. A treasure, like love. Bold and mysterious, though attractive because it is foreign, a likeness shared by two, in a single moment. Love, understanding and memory as strong as ever. Like a little magical indian you can hold in your hand, tell all of your secrets to, cry with and dance to records in the middle night with. He will confuse you, inspire you and believe in you, and in the end, underlining all of his fragility and innocence suspended in time, and infinite space you can wrap him up in fading purple tissue and tuck him away in a box, like a hug. You can take him out anytime. Although it's existence is just mirrored as memories exist in your mind. Your head being the purple tissue. Objects can mean anything and everything and nothing. And so can people. But objects... a lock of hair, the scent someone leaves behind on a pillow, a necklace, a letter, a photograph. Moments in time. There in lies love in it's manifested form. A form for others to look at in wonder. And I have those things, and god I wouldn't trade them. Her song "Because The Night" echoes in my head. And she makes me feel so good inside. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, I'm 22-years old, I love to write, I love to sing, I love to dance, and I am forever in love, trying to understand.
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