All this kvetching about things related to my (ever-precarious) gender role and identity may have to do with a date i may have tonight. May. It may be a preliminary evaluative “check-out-the-goods” opportunity where i’m supposed to try my best to be coherent while maintaining a vague sense of romanticism. Or, it might be two friends going out to dinner. Except, i think it could be a date… you know, Friday Night and all that. But, i don’t want to assume. So, it’s really out of my hands. I have nothing to do with it. I just need to shave and shower and show up looking pretty. Well… pretty for a guy. You know what i mean.
Thus all the anxiety about the razor. And the fairy.
best of
I happen to really need a razor. Like, alot. I am down to my last disposable razor, and it seems to have lost it’s sheen. This is not to say i suddenly have some sort of mutant five o’clock shadow or anything of the kind, but i definitely start looking like a gang-member if i don’t shave in any given 36-hour period. It all would seem to add up … lack of razor, razor in the checkout aisle, me with a large margin between the price of eggs and saran wrap and the $20 i have in my hand. But, do i buy the razor? The shiny, new, rubber-grip, extra-blade, sleek, black, razor? Do i?
Of course not. Why? Because i am too embarrassed to pick up a razor and have it rung in the middle of a supermarket. I might get away with it at CVS, where they deal regularly in those sorts of things, but i feel like if i had attempted to buy it last night the cashier would’ve responded in the fashion of “Damn, boy, if you’re gonna buy your daddy a razor for Christmas least you could do would be get him an electric.” Or, you know, something else to that incredibly embarrassing and demeaning effect.
I’m afraid to buy men’s toiletry products in public. God help us all if i ever have to go and buy condoms*.
It’s just as if i’m done being a boy, and we all know i’m not a boy anymore, but the Man-Fairy will not come down and wave his magic wand to make the whole thing official so i can do things like buy shaving cream, or fuzzy-handcuffs, or anything else a man might buy.
I mean, i…. um, did i just say Man-Fairy? With his magic wand? Was i seriously blogging about that for, like, an entire second there?
I have been hearing the Beatles my entire life — first on the record player as a baby, and then on long trips to the shore on our cruddy Past Masters tape, and then on shiny new see-through cassettes of Abbey Road and The White Album. There are constants in my life; everyone has constants. Even the most unstable and unable people i know have things they can always turn to, or that they will always turn to.
The parking lot at Kiddie City Toy Store, and Ringo sings “Octopus’ Garden.” I am playing “Name That Beatle.” We are crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge to New Jersey and Paul and Mom and I are wailing “Oh Darling” so hard that our voice is cracking around the edges as one. We are zooming down the Atlantic City Expressway and Lennon croons out from carefully nested speakers “I’m So Tired” as i lazily stick my feet out of the window.
“I’m so tired.”
The wind dug between all of my toes as i laughed and sank my head back into the seat. The drive to WildWood was always longer on the way there than coming back. I was always so busy trying to decide if it was John and Lennon singing that half the time i missed George. George: the quiet one. My mom loves Paul with all of her teenaged heart, but on the way home she would confess to me conspiratorially that she’s always had a soft spot for Mr. Harrison. “The ugly one?,” i would ask? “With those cheekbones?” “Does he play the second guitar?”
My mother denies the existence of Middle Beatles and will glare at you icily if you mention Let It Be, so she first was eyes at George Harrison with his bowl cut and then sliding around in the midsts of his delicate guitars as his songs grew more and more central to the end records. My entire life it has been just the two of us, and just the three of them: Paul, George, and Ringo — because we didn’t have poor dead John around anymore.
At fifteen i got my guitar, and it never occurred to me to play anything by the Fab Four. The Beatles were more than the sum of their parts, and to this day i still can’t quite distill any of their songs to a single guitar and voice. But, my guitar was a door to things i had never heard before. Paul’s deft bass lines. Lennon’s funky solos. Ringo’s amazing drumming on the back half of Abbey Road. George’s stunningly simple “Something,” and Clapton adding to the throb of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I listened to the Beatles for my entire life as a phenomenon … as if they would walk into a room and music would just happen. It wasn’t until i got to college that it occurred to me that they all brought their own distinct musical merits to the table, and that you could pick them out one by one if you listened closely. A McCartney song, but a Harrison Riff. A Lennon vocal with that twelve-string chiming in the background.
I never owned a Beatles record of my own before yesterday other than the sad red #1 that exists as a placeholder for albums i’ll eventually have to own as an adult, and for two albums i know as well as “Lucky Star” or “Still Rock and Roll to Me.” I know them: the songs, the lyrics. I never knew the music before, though. Yesterday i locked myself in an empty house, in an empty room, and i turned my headphones as high as they would go. And listened.
At twenty I heard the Beatles for the first time.
At twenty i have suddenly found myself with only two of them left. I will always remember sitting on Michella’s couch in July and seeing TWA 800 emblazoned across the screen of Good Morning America, and i will always remember sitting in admissions desperately trying to load up CNN’s website this September. And, i will always remember myself curled into a ball on that rubbery hospital bed, trailing IV tubes and sniffling back tears because i didn’t want anyone to think i was crying about me.
I wasn’t.
On on empty stomach and an hour out of the hospital i somehow decided that i needed to take a walk — if for any reason then to remind myself that there is such a thing of fresh air and that most streets are longer than the distance from my hospital bed to the elevator bank. So i walked.
Comparatively, my stay in the hospital will shrink and shrink away until it is finally nothing from a distance, and i swung out each leg in a wide arc in front of the other to add to that distance as i marched down Walnut street. The distance between here and class, that i am dreading the walk of right at this instant, evaporated away and i kept walking. Charging. In my head i was at a solid jog, feeling the in out in of my breath and watching as i passed everyone around me. Honestly, i couldn’t tell you if i was jogging or not.
I got past Drexel and suddenly i found myself at the highway; it borders the Schuylkill on the west side and metro Philadelphia rises in glittering tiers on the other side. Feet planted firm on the bridge, my city looked like an artist’s rendering of itself: flat and unchanging … detailed but with no depth. I don’t know how long i stood there staring at it staring back at me before i walked towards it. I expected to come up against a translucent sort of wall where i could run my hand against the shimmering image of the city and try to press through, but before i realized it i was past it and inside the image i had observed.
Somehow it was different. I still had that flavor of hospital in me, the tiny lines of adhesive from all of the tape that held in my IVs, the ID tag on my wrist. I hadn’t thought to take it off, honestly.
Every word i said came out the way it wasn’t meant, and i’m wondering if i was really ready to leave.
A rare occurrence… me, my mother, and my father, talking about our respective colonoscopies. My mom is wearing a Madonna-style “New York” tank top and just bribed the food services people to bring me extra jello, my dad is wearing a denim shirt from his store that says “Pete’s Gun Shop” and brought me his 1960’s boxed set of Lord of the Rings, and i’m merrily clicking away as i assure them that Everclear would be a totally appropriate clear liquid to mix with my cranberry juice.
Yeah, we’re fucked up no matter how you slice it.