Apr 8, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
In a heart-wrenching article today in the Science Times section of the New York Times, Lisa Reswick writes about her banished brother, born with Down Syndrome and sent away by her physician father to become a ward of the state.
She and her siblings grew up knowing about the existence of her brother Jimmy, but no one was allowed to visit him. No one was allowed to speak of him. The author only met her brother at the end of his life, at his deathbed and then at his funeral.
It’s hard to think about the world advancing so much in empathy with the current likes of Trump, Cruz, and the extreme version of them: ISIS. Or just today, the state of Mississippi affirming business owners the right to discriminate against gay people based on religion. We do however live in more enlightened times in terms of our feelings about individuals with special needs like Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum to name but two. Not even the Donald would risk diss-ing a Down Syndrome person. At least I hope not.
But back in the Dark Ages of my childhood it was a different story.
The author of the article in the New York Times was haunted throughout life by the notion of a brother she did not know. A brother who was different than she was. A brother who did not belong and therefore a brother who was sent away. And of course the hidden message in all this is: if I can send him away, I can send you away. Better behave!
Though I have always had all my marbles (relatively) and my IQ is adequate, I too faced expulsion by my father to an institution: an orphanage.
Though I was never actually banished there, (could I have blocked it out like so many other things?). Nevertheless, some small persistent part of me still lives there in that orphanage to this day. To paraphrase Ferlinghetti, “The Buckner Orphanage of the Mind.”
I was born prematurely after my mother’s tubes were meant to be tied fourteen months after the birth of my brother, the longed for boy. And according to one account, an abortion attempt. I was in an incubator for a long time. I guess I was one of those miracle babies you read about on the front page of The National Enquirer: “Can’t Kill Her Now She Won’t Shut Up!”
But I was no miraculous thing, not to my own father who in a playful mood as he often was, told me I came from Buckner’s Orphanage in Dallas, Texas where we lived until I was five. And that’s where I would be going if he had anything to say about the matter. “I’ll know the reason why!” is one of his charming expressions that to this day, resides within me invoking terror when I think of it. And in fact, there was even, a car trip of some few miles to view the outside of the orphanage where presumably my place was secured. It was a large establishment with lots of out buildings. My adult mind would label it Dickensian, and indeed, the building and the institution date back to the Nineteenth Century. I just checked. Everything is on line, every childhood terror has a website! Buckner Orphanage lives on.
My overweight father literally exploded when I was very young, following some Luau where he ate too much suckling pig. I know, it sounds almost like a joke by Nabokov. But it’s true. One day he was there, shouting and reviling and the next day he was dead meat with an apple in his mouth. He was very very young to die, but there was nothing to be done for him. After he was gone, there were no more threats of sending me to Buckner Orphanage. And of course no possibility of changing the way it was between us. Could I have one day made him like me? I’ll never know.
To this day, pitiful though it is, I can truthfully say, I missed out by not being a Daddy’s Girl. Someone who was once called Princess, or Sweetie pie. Or whatever Daddy’s Girls are called.
Someone who would tell me I was pretty enough to win a contest and smart enough to go to med school. Not Buckner Orphanage where my doppelgänger lived. My doppelgänger who actually had been dropped off in the Chrysler by her father for sins too numerous to mention.
She still lives there at the orphanage, and like the children in fairy tales she has never grown old. She is three or four or five and she is as integral to who I am, as my arms, legs, eyes, shoulders, imagination or sense of the absurd.
The late Nobel Laureate Irme Ketesz wrote: “We suffered on account of our youth, as of a serious illness. Families I hate you!” He also said, “I read, that the concept of rule is invariably one of terror, and rule by terror invariably means rule by the father.”
The good part of having grown up at least metaphorically in Buckner Orphanage is Jane Eyre lived there. And so did Oliver Twist. When I grew up I found out Patrick Melrose also lived there as well as all sorts of other great and talented children.
Rule by terror be damned: I’m in very good company!
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Mar 30, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
My husband has been home for a couple of months. It’s always nice the first month when he’s home. We go out to dinner, we cook, we go to the movies, we watch TV, we see friends, and we have for a while, a semblance of a normal life like other people live. After that month however, well… I want some peace and quiet and not to relate during the day. I want my freaking house back. I want him to shut up!
Film people are always worried about the next job. I worry too. He doesn’t have to say it, it’s written all over him. What if no one hires me again? What if this is my last job? The same thing happens to me when I finish a project and I’m waiting to start another, will I ever write again? Will the powers that control such goings on betray me and condemn me to staring at the empty screen for the rest of my life? Since both of us have lived this way for nearly all of our marriage, doesn’t make the whole process any easier. We’ve done some version of this in New York, in Los Angeles, in East Hampton. Sometimes we’d land on one coast, when he’d get a call for an interview and turn around and be on the other coast within 10 hours of landing. The old canard about shoveling elephant shit and giving up show business is absolutely horribly true.
I believe this is one of the reasons why our son has extremely short hair, lots of beautifully tailored suits, eight zillion ties and became a republican because it was as far away as he could get from the film biz and freelance life as he knew it where one minute daddy was home. And one minute he was gone. It seems we were always standing in the street waving at the departing cab: “Is Daddy really gone again?”
Often I fantasize that I might have married some businessman with regular hours. Someone who didn’t like team sports, but had a reverence for the arts; someone like Rebecca West’s husband who financed all her forays into Eastern Europe empowering her to write Grey Falcon Black Lamb. Yes, in my fantasy, I’m married to some sterling character who wears a bespoke suit and leather shoes and loves and appreciates me for my intellect and creativity. And of course has eight zillion bucks.
No doubt my husband has his own version of this fantasy. And wishes for an arts loving lawyer or doctor who works away from home, yet manages to get a healthy dinner on the table while she’s not earning eight zillion bucks perhaps enough to finance a small art film and so forth.
If he doesn’t get a job soon, I’m going to lose it, I’ve been telling myself for about two weeks now. I’ve left notes in the doors of places where I used to rent office space. I’ve tried working in the library to get away from here. I’ve tried earplugs, white noise, I’ve tried everything.
But now as of half an hour ago, after much ringing of the cell phone and pacing up and down on the wood floor above me whilst talking on said cell phone, the house is quiet. It’s just Henry and me. After a couple of phone calls, and a loud banging shut of the front door, the Beemer drives out of the driveway and he’s gone faster than you can say, “The script’s kind of cute, not bad… I’ll text you….”
And now of course, I’m somewhat bereft. The house seems very quiet. Henry is looking around wondering, “Hey where’s the testosterone flinging ball throwing guy with the hair on his chest?”
Stockholm syndrome?
Same old, same old?
What I’ll do for a day or two is mope around, then everything will start to pick up. And by the time I get used to no company, being on my own, not making dinner and so forth and so on, he’ll be back.
You cannot win if you are married to someone in the film biz.
I remember once years ago, going to the cutting room of the moment on a Saturday night with our young son, so he could see his dad and have a bite. There was a period of time when we were doing a lot of this on Saturday night and Sunday night too. The cutting room was in a whole complex of cutting rooms in some office building. Saturday night and room after room had a tired editor in a greenish black dingy room staring at a screen.
In the room next to my husband, a tired editor got up, stretched a little. Like all editors, he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of sneakers. His T-shirt read, “Never Love An Editor.” And I’ve never forgotten that T-shirt.
But it was too late by then. And now it’s way way too late.
I love the editor. I’m glad he’s got a gig and now, I have no excuse for not getting my book done. I’m busted.
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Mar 23, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
It was my birthday last week and my good friend L gave me a coupon for reflexology—so thoughtful as I once told her my idea of heaven is having someone work on my feet.
“And you can walk there,” she told me, something she also knows I love, to be able to walk where you are going in LA.
The New Age healing center where my appointment was scheduled is a place I’ve often passed. It’s a brutal looking two-story post war affair less than half a block from the freeway.
My reflexologist was late. I sat in the waiting room reading the magazine published each month by the center. I was deep into an article on “recognizing verbal abuse” when a tall man appeared in the doorway. I was bemused because I had all ten signs of having just been verbally abused by my husband that very morning—and I thought we had enjoyed a fairly mellow time. Obviously the writer of the article has a low opinion of the quotidian dialogue between long married members of the Hebrew race.
The tall man was wearing an Indian tan color gauzy shirt and a crystal around his neck. He bore more than a striking resemblance to two very different looking people: the unsettling Bill Cosby; and a good friend of ours, the reassuring John Axness, a very blond, Nordic type. Right away, the Cosby part worried me. While the Axness part reassured me. Here I was in an empty building on a Saturday afternoon with a complete stranger who looked like Bill Cosby. Yet, John Axness is the one of the nicest men I’ve ever met.
“How much water do you drink?” he asked.
“Not enough,” I replied, which is entirely true.
“Here, before we start our work, it’s good to hydrate. I’ll go get you a cup of water.”
“No,” I insisted trying to hide my nervousness! “I just had a big drink, I forgot!”
I smiled. C/A nodded. Then he did this really weird thing, he closed his eyes and did, a New Age version of an Orthodox Jew daven-ing, rocking back and forth. With his own addition, a fluttering of the eyelids. I didn’t ask if he was praying over me, I just sat there and watched him.
“Take off your shoes. I start with the hands first. Then I move to the feet.”
I took off my shoes, he motioned to the table. At least I didn’t drink the water, I thought.
I lay down and C/A took my right hand. This went on for a while, and part of me was just getting into it. But part of me, I have to admit was on guard.
When he got to the feet, I began to remember a voodoo book I had purchased in New Orleans when I was nine years old. The voodoo Queen binds one set of healthy feet to another set of corpse feet. The blood of the living miraculously rouses the dead back from the underworld. The real question was: if C not A was working on my feet could he do mischief with them?
In spite of all my misgivings. I began to relax. Sort of. It’s hard not to feel good when an experienced practitioner is working on your feet.
I kept nodding off. I dreamed for a minute or two, an anxiety dream I will spare gentle readers.
I was awakened by the sound of a phone on silent mode. This went on for more than a minute. I started counting muted buzzes.
C/A dropped my foot and whispered into the phone, “I can’t talk, I’m in session.” He listened. He told whoever it was, “I can’t talk. I’m in session. You can’t call me when I’m in session.” He didn’t sound at all happy. I thought of the ten signs of verbal abuse. He wasn’t abusing whoever it was on the other end. He didn’t like that person calling. He was pissed. But he was “holding his mud” as they say. I took that as a good sign.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was daven-ing over my body. Bowing, eyes fluttering. And then, all at once, it was over. I was putting on my socks, tying up my running shoes, and C/A was telling me, “I accept gratuities.”
“Wonderful!” I declared, fished in my purse and looked for a ten and settled happily for a twenty. He wasn’t C. He wasn’t A. What he was happened to be a pretty damn good body- worker.
“Thank you so much!”
I ran out the door down the stairs of the empty creepy building and leaned against the door. It was locked.
Fuck. I thought. It’s like Jason in Friday the 13th. You think he’s dead, but he ain’t dead, he is risen and he’s going to kill you.
C/A was coming down the stairs.
“I forgot! The door is locked.”
And that was it. I ran out of there, under the freeway, past the homeless encampment, the new track for the metro, past Ralphs, heart pounding in my chest all the way home.
My heart is pounding still as I type this.
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Mar 9, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, the following ad appeared in Marketplace:
FOR SALE: Saul Bellow’s Desk $10,000 Victorian mahogany roll top, leather writing surface, pigeonholes. Part of the furniture of his house, appears in book jacket photo. Details.
An email address with the last name of Bellow followed the ad. I answered it.
Why?
I was curious.
And the seller, whom I’m assuming is his son Daniel, wrote right back. At first I pretended to be interested. And in a way, if I had ten grand to blow in such a way, I would be. I’ve always wanted a roll top desk. Also, could talent rub off? I have read somewhere in a feng shui book that one should be careful when buying second hand furniture. The vibrational waves of the previous owner are contained in the intimate belongings. Obviously, we don’t if we can help it, ever wear other people’s underpants. But a chair, think of how much intimate contact a chair has had with its owner.
Unwashed encounters, I might add…
A desk too, has been facing the heart of the person who sits behind it. If I had to pick five major male writers of the last century, Bellow wouldn’t be on my list. Not even if the list were major Jewish male writers of the last century. But I did like him, and I did read Henderson the Rain King, Humboldt’s Gift and a few others and thought they were great. (He also translated I.B. Singer who is on the top of most of my little lists.)
Would I want to sit at Saul Bellow’s desk? Maybe, if it could rub off some of its confidence, some of its zest for life. For he was a zesty writer. A passionate writer. I like all that.
Why do you want to sell his desk? I emailed.
He wrote back, I need a new kiln. The writer of the email and the owner of the desk is a potter in Great Barrington, Mass. The desk was left to him in his father’s will. He told me that.
In my next email, I ratted myself out and said, I really couldn’t afford the desk, and also didn’t think the NYRB was a very good place to sell that desk.
After that I didn’t hear back.
I have on good account, if you pay enough, you can rent the Sistine Chapel for fifteen minutes or half an hour. I just did a search. And in fact, private viewings of the Sistine Chapel are on sale online. From $369.71 USD (per person), your group of 15 can have the Chapel. That makes the experience for a plutocrat and his/her date, at roughly half the price of owning the famous roll top owned by the Nobel Laureate for life!
Everything has a price, of course.
I applaud the heir of that desk for parting with a famous piece of memorabilia to buy something for himself.
For my own part, never having had an engagement ring or any diamonds to speak of, in the past few years, I’ve inherited two diamond rings in a short period of time. I wear one (with the larger diamond and the prettier setting) and keep the other one in my underwear drawer; afraid to have it reset for something I’d like a whole lot better, like a necklace or something. It belonged to my grandmother whom I loved, and who loved the ring.
Love, superstition, desire to be close to the owner of the relic? None of the above, all of the above?
Saturday I received my new edition of the New York Review of Books and the ad wasn’t repeated. So I guess I was wrong and the NYRB was a good place to sell the famous desk.
My ring is still in my underwear drawer, though I bought a bowl from the potter’s website for 99 bucks. Here’s a link to it: danielbellow.com. Talent obviously runs in the family.
I hope he gets his new kiln!
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Feb 25, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
The sight of several posters in my neighborhood never fail to infuriate me: Total XXX announces one billboard on the right when I’m driving to the Whole Foods on National Blvd. It pictures a really hard-bodied woman with fake everything and a leering smile. Best Gentlemen’s Club in LA, boasts another on the walk to the movie theatre on Pico (a strange fact of life in LA is that the mile and a half walk to the movie theatre takes less time than driving there and winding one’s way down in a queue of cars in the fume-ridden parking structure.) You hail a cab in New York to get someplace fast. In LA, if it’s close you are far more likely to arrive on time if you walk the ugly mean streets that were never designed for the human foot. Or the human anything.
The gentlemen’s club called the “Silver Reign” is closest, across the street from Staples, in back of a little mini mall that features a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a burger joint that’s been there forever, and is next to “The Wag’s Club” a doggy day care center, that won’t let you come in and look around. I tried once. You have to have an appointment. (Henry isn’t allowed there anyway, because we have yet to do the dirty deed on him.)
I think they should switch names. “Silver Reign” is a nice name for a plush and expensive place to house man’s best friend for the day. “The Wag’s Club” is a far more appropriate name for a place to observe man’s worst enemy having a sexual encounter with a pole.
Whatever they are named, gentlemen’s clubs (also known as fraternities, stag parties, men-in-funny-hat lodges) have long had a tradition of hiring spicy entertainment to liven the boys up.
I was in an all woman’s book club once. No strippers appeared. Nobody talked about naked men. Sometimes on someone’s birthday at Conde Nast, though, which was 95% women, there was some crummy cake from the erotic bakery and a lot of tittering when the slice containing the penis was served. I hold fast that no men were actually exploited in the baking or eating of those cakes.
In recent years, in my coed writing group, I remember overhearing a group of actors and writers talking about online porn. I marched myself right into the middle of the men and declared, “my husband doesn’t do that!” He visits woodworking websites!” They all laughed at me. One patted me on the back and said, “Mary, you’re living in a dream world!”
That evening, when I went home, I asked my husband if he ever did online porn—if he was part of this massive, online gentleman’s club. When he blushed I was totally shocked. I’m still shocked. Especially since I don’t know the password to his computer. Or his phone.
What does it mean that you never see a poster of a guy with a loin cloth and a huge, ever-erect artificial dick on your way to the movie house? Most of the time, “XXX-rated, fully exposed,” is going to mean a woman’s body is exposed and vulnerable. Not a man’s.
If sex is for sale, the majority of sellers are going to be women. Is this the same old, same old gender inequality?
Or do we have a long way to go baby?
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Feb 15, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I just googled Writer’s Block.
Along with all the mental symptoms, I also suffer from a full range of physical symptoms, because the form of Writer’s Block I get always comes with physical symptoms, as if the mental symptoms weren’t bad or extreme enough.
First the mental: Every sentence I write sucks. Every sentence I write sounds stupid. Sentences grind to a halt. There is no flow. Today I looked at something I wrote yesterday and it made absolutely no sense. I was writing in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language.
For a couple of weeks before the block went into full throttle, and I was writing at a steady pace, my hands began to hurt; my arms to ache. My fingers swelled. I couldn’t get my aquamarine ring on. My neck often hurts, so I ignored that symptom. And then, something I’ve never experienced before, the feeling that some monster’s hands were grabbing me by the waist digging strong fingers in the kidney area; any moment I expected to be lifted off the ground and thrown—where else—out the window.
I’ve read that Graham Greene wrote 300 words every day in fountain pen. Did he write his allowed amount, then start counting the words, perhaps smudging them with his cigarette stained finger? I’ll never know. Of course he didn’t have Internet to distract him. Just opium, nicotine and prostitutes.
Last Sunday, day two of the block, I bought another copy of Travels with my Aunt, (not one of his masterpieces, but a fabulous book and movie) because I can’t find my old copy and I’m going to start reading it three hundred words at a time. Maybe this will help with my writer’s block. Maybe by the time I start doing this exercise, my block will be over.
The New Agers have it right when they say, positive affirmations only. Here are some of mine:
I am ready to continue writing Man Woman Dog.
Man Woman Dog flows freely.
This is the best draft ever.
Something good will come of this!
And finally, most pitifully: You will live through this.
I also wonder if there is some correlation between the fact that my main character, who when the book opens, has not written or drawn anything in two years (I’m on day six and ready to off myself!) has gotten over his writer’s/illustration block and is happily working again in New York, while I’m sitting on my ergonomic stool in West LA eating my guts out? Does somebody always have to be suffering in my small, cold little universe? The real one I live in or the imaginary one I write in?
D.W. Winnocott, the great British psychoanalyst, cured Samuel Beckett of his writing block. But I’m not Samuel Beckett. My shrink’s on holiday, and thinking one has the same problems as a genius is not only delusional, it’s highly depressing as well.
However, I was thinking of taking my laptop over to the psychoanalytic society that’s a few blocks away and sitting there at one of their long cool tables, something I have done in the past, though my library membership has expired by now. And it will cost me a hundred bucks to renew, provided I can talk them into letting me write there, only the shrinks are supposed to use the tables, but last time I asked, they were very kind. I don’t feel capable of talking anybody into doing anything at the present moment. All I can do is sit here and stare.
FYI: if you have gotten this far, you have read twice as many words plus as Graham Greene wrote every day in fountain pen in his long, sexy, smoky life as a genius.
Me, I’ve written nothing whatsoever today except this. And this doesn’t count.
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Feb 3, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Like millions of others I have read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, thrown away garbage bags full of crap inspired by the question, what sparks joy?
Sparking joy is a concept every woman understands. I asked my husband if any of his clothing sparks joy.
“What are you talking about?”
“Do any of your shirts spark joy? How about your collection of crew jackets?”
“Let’s not exaggerate, Marcus.”
“So let’s throw them out, you never wear them. They’re not sparking joy!”
“They’re collectors items!”
We left it at that.
The tidying maven tells us when you clean out your closets you will have an encounter with the real you. Myself, I had a memory. I was eleven. And I wanted a certain fake fur coat.
One didn’t see an awful lot of polyester fake fur then. Children wore wool car coats, or wool knee length coats with brass buttons. I had a navy blue double breasted wool coat lined in plaid that would probably spark joy in me today, but back then, it was just another dull, dutiful coat, acquired at my rich Uncle Earl’s clothing store in Oklahoma City where we got things free because my father, his baby brother died, and we were the poor relations.
This white fake fur coat began to appear in the schoolyard of South Highlands Elementary School. I saw one of them, two of them, up to half a dozen of them. This coat was the coat of the moment. It fell below the butt; it zipped up the front and had a pointed hood. It was bordered around all the seams with this fabulous piping. My friend Ruthie possessed one. My friend Kay possessed one. Her father was one of the partners of the department store that had the snazzier clothes than the one my father left behind when he died and where I got my clothes. And it was there at Selber Brothers, I discovered on a scouting mission one afternoon when I took the trolley downtown after school, a whole big rack of them. The coat cost $39.99. And was, I knew, four dollars and ninety nine cents more than my mother’s housekeeper Aline made in a whole week, moping floors, cooking dinner, waiting on us at the table and so forth.
But I wanted this coat that was as far away as the moon. I believed this coat would change my fortunes on the playground. I believed this coat would make me popular. Prettier. Less prone to insult and getting beaten up by the stray bigoted child who would call me a lover of dark skinned people or a Jew and stuff pine straw down my throat. And whom I would never rat out for fear of reprisal.
I might have had a dollar in change in my piggy bank. I knew better than to ask my Grandmother who would just offer to make me a coat. One simply did not ask my mother for anything. It was like the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not ask thy mother for anything. Mother was tired. Mother was sick, had to work, hated to work…
Nevertheless, I did end up asking her for the coat. She turned me down. Once, twice. She shut the door of her bedroom in my face. She sent me to my room. She told me she couldn’t afford it. She cried and made me feel guilty. But I still kept asking her for the coat. I had to. I was begging for my life. The life I wanted anyway.
Miraculously, I got her to buy the coat.
I remember when she gave in, when we walked over to Selber Brothers to get the coat. And I put it on. I was filled with the great desire to show myself to the world. I was eleven years old and I had this wonderful white coat. I put the hood up, I probably danced around.
My mother looked at me in the coat and said, “It’s not right, it doesn’t look good, you talked me into it, I can’t afford it.” And probably lit a cigarette and blew smoke on it.
If she didn’t exactly make me hate my beautiful coat, the first and last thing I ever asked of her, my punishment was, that the coat changed nothing. It was myself I hated even more. Still I wore it, I wore it till it turned grey and fell apart and then one day it disappeared. And I went back to wearing wool car coats with toggle buttons.
Clothing contains our body and our body contains our desires. Perhaps that’s why women romanticize–often make a fetish of–our clothing because it is a way to contain our deep desires. Or a way to wear them in plain sight disguised as something else.
To this day, asking for anything I want fills me with dread and often guilt. I want to be like Mother Theresa who only needed the worn nun’s habit and her spectacles, or was that some other martyr?
Be careful when you clean out your closet. Be careful what you wish for.
But be even more careful what you insist on. It will haunt you all the days of your life, and if you have the misfortune of actually possessing the object of your desire, someone will make you feel guilty for your desire and take all its pleasure away.
Tidying my closet, I accidentally threw out the only pair of sweat pants that has ever sparked anything close to joy when I wore them, and cut the hell out of my hand on a wire hanger. My friend Susan says housework is dangerous. I agree. So, be careful if you read that book too.
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Jan 13, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
It’s been cold here for weeks. Inside, we’ve been eating lots of soup and outside almost everyone is wearing socks and shoes and the last two days, galoshes due to the lovely el Niño’s. This is a real departure for southern California where everybody walks around in flip-flops.
Today after the torrential showers, the sun came out; I looked down at my grubby hands and feet, and decided since I needed my eyeglasses adjusted after I sat on them, I’d nip into the mani/pedi place up the stairs from Optical Designs on Montana. I think I have mentioned, there are on last count, more than eighteen places to get your nails done and to get waxed on Montana. I remember when there used to be stationary stores and hardware stores. And a nursery when I first moved here. A few blocks South on Wilshire there were even two or three bookstores I can think of. Ou sont les hardware stores, stationary stores and bookstores of yesteryear? They live on in my mind as wispy reminders of a slower, gentler time, when only rich people had cell phones. And sometimes no one could find a person for hours!
Most of the mani/pedi places are on the street –but this one, was hidden from the casual passerby, and after I ascended the stairs, when I stood in the door, two men pounced down on me and sat me down.
In fact they weren’t the only guys at the place, there were women workers, but more guy workers also. I spied one following a women into the secret recesses of the waxing room. Wow, things really have changed. By now, I had told my dynamic duo I didn’t want polish; I wanted very short nails and a buff. And they were both working away on me vigorously. It’s altogether different having two guys work on you.
Like everybody else, I’ve read a lot of the articles on the health conditions of the nail workers. How many of the girls and I do mean girls are running away from Johns and trying to live a decent life. And how once they try and live that decent life, they are succumbing to cancer from the fucking fumes of our nail polish.
Yes, since I know, it makes me uncomfortable to get mani/pedi’s much as I like how I look and I always try and get the story of the pretty girls who work on me, most of who come from Vietnam. (First we bomb the shit out of their beautiful country—then we welcome them with open arms only to exploit them and kill them!)
Oddly enough, none of these habitual liberal rants were going through my head as the boys worked on me. The foot boy with his cheese grater was going after every callous on my heels. And the hand guy was buffing, buffing, buffing each nail till it shone.
Did this dynamic dual also wax? One for the armpits, one for the snatch? I did not inquire for fear I would be forced to the back of the salon…
At the risk of sounding tacky, I think about the waxing issue often, since to do yoga on the west side of Los Angeles as often as I do, is to be side by side with the shiniest smoothest certainly the most hairless men and women on the planet. Lots of tattoos but nary a stray body hair –and this is as true of the men as well as of the women.
I guess this has registered with me on both a conscious and a subconscious level, since I wrote a scene in my new novel the other day, where one of the female characters, a very beautiful, trendy marketing person, wants her would -be lover to groom before they have at it.
Later, when the guy has at it with someone else, that someone else is confronted with a better-groomed male than she is. It all works out just fine, but it’s a moment that I’m guessing may be happening more often than we imagine out there in hook-up land.
To be waxed and groomed is to be living in the first world. And most pre- eminently to be living in LA.
Could hairless shiny tattooed, bodies be, along with Mickey Mouse and movie stars, The City Of Angel’s contribution to the zeitgeist?
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Dec 30, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Today is Henry’s fourth birthday. I wish I could buy him a steak or a hamburger or a hot dog or something meaty he would adore, but Henry is one of those persnickety allergic white dogs who has to eat a very strict and limited diet, otherwise he scratches down to the skin and looks like hamburger meat himself. God, it’s awful if he goes off his pitiful little diet. I used to cook for Henry: fresh meat, veggies, and I’d give him flax seed oil. Now, he just eats this canned single ingredient crap that he just loves and the espresso cup full of the dog cereal that he also just loves and with which I bribe him. And he’s perfect. Thank God for the vet who told me to take him off the healthy and nutritious diet I was giving him and convinced me to put him on the canned crap.
I got Henry because I always wanted a dog, my whole life, and never had one, other than the dogs my mother would bring home once in a while for my brother because he had no father and would promptly give away once the dog did something unseemly in the house as dogs are want to do. Neiman, the cocker spaniel, Flipper, the boxer, Count JoJo, the miniature poodle, Coleen, the dachshund (whom my sister called dog do), they all made brief tenures chez nous and they all departed not very long after they arrived. I loved them all.
My son and I longed for a dog when he was growing up, and when he was punished in school for skipping (which happened more than I care to discuss) he would always opt for working at the pound to be near the pups. And once he brought home a picture he had taken there of the dog he wanted with all his heart but our horrible landlord whom I’ve written about before, wouldn’t let us have him. FUCK HIM. And curse his memory. I’m glad he’s dead. But enough of that. I’m over all that as of 2016. Bud Riley villain of my early years in LA, I let thee go….at least I hope I do.
Anyway, my son grew up dog-less and left home. We moved to a dog friendly place and then when my son’s cat died, my shrink who is a devout dog-a-phile, told me it was time I grew up and got a dog.
The first dog I brought home was from a rescue place I’d been told about that operated out of the back of a clothing store on Montana in Santa Monica. I had requested a small dog, one I could carry with me between LA and New York, and so it came to pass that I got a call one day, and the doggie rescue person told me she had a perfect little poodle for me and I should come and get her. I got in the car and did just that.
She was a sweet little white thing and she had come from a terrible home and her name, God help her, turned out to be Mary. Why on earth would anyone, even a rescue person who is bored already with the naming of dogs, name a dog Mary?
Mary wasn’t “my dog” and I ended up taking her back with a huge donation to the pet rescue place after a couple of days. It took me nearly a year to get over the experience and to this day I wake up in the middle of the night and worry about Mary. Would I have kept her if she hadn’t had the same bloody name as I do? And if she hadn’t come from a terrible place where she was abused reminding me of things I’d like to forget? I have no idea. All I know is that she broke my heart, and every time I looked at her I wanted to cry. Poor Mary.
Just around the time my shrink was reminding me that I had always wanted a dog, I reconnected with Nodie Williams who comes from Shreveport and also went to the convent I went to: St. Vincent’s home for wayward girls. Nodie raises Jack Russells, at Frayed Knot Farm in Arkansas. If you ever want a Jack Russell call Nodie. She said she had a little guy named Seamus, who was the runt of his litter and had a very sweet nature. I sent Nodie a check, she started calling Seamus “Henry”, and I proceeded to be scared out of my mind for the next weeks, until I got down to Arkansas and met Henry, my perfect little pup, whose been by my side ever since.
Actually Henry isn’t perfect. He’s a maniac. He barks for no good reason, he snips at children, once in a while he raises his leg at the front door, but I’ve never met a better little doggie or one who is a better match for me and my husband. And Nodie was right. He’s unbelievably sweet… when he wants to be, he’s a perfect little angel.
Henry started out in a horrible little dog cage known as “the crate”, then we axed the crate, he took over a chiropractic pillow that was supposed to cure my neck, and then of course the thing happened that we swore would never happen, he sleeps in the bed with us. Right between us in fact.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I reach out to pat Henry, I’ll find myself holding hands with my husband who has also reached out to do the same: find Henry.
He’s our great solace, our funny little dog child, our ferocious little fellow and the fucking best dog in the world.
Would I trade him for a well behaved dog? No. Yes. Sometimes. But actually no. Henry is my beast, and I’m his person. And that’s that.
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Dec 15, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Maybe my washing machine was just fed up with all the loads it has been churning out during the recent rodent crises—maybe (and this really freaks me out) the mice ate something vital—I shimmied myself between the shelf above the washing machine and the machine itself, poked my head behind and saw, yes, more mouse shit. I’ve yet to figure out how to get behind there. I guess I’ll drop a trap there, perhaps with a fishing pole.
This morning when I was running the first load of the day, at 7 a.m. right after I came in from walking Henry, a terrible noise erupted from the machine. Think of the biggest imbalance noise with ten pairs of sneakers and multiply that by ten and you’ll have an idea of the noise that I heard coming from the machine. Like the invasion of Afghanistan. I turned it off, opened the door and smoke was billowing out, and the terrible stench of burnt rubber filled my nostrils.
That was the good part.
The bad part is Sears Customer Service. And the home repair phone queue, where a computer has just told me that they now have a brand new computer that understands full sentences. Naturally, the sophisticated computer did not understand my carefully modulated sentence. So, now I’m in the all too familiar hell of being in line with the call volume “unusually high.” And the computer voice telling me over and over that if I visit them online I’ll have better results.
Why oh why am I in every phone queue with unusually high call volume? I’ll tell you why… Because there are not enough outsourced phone representatives, even in Mumbai or Manila where that’s a good job and “big company” doesn’t have to pay living wage, never mind benefits. I will go even farther and speculate that no one responsible for foisting this dishonest, unethical way of doing business with its customers has ever had to wait through a call line; blood pressure rising, nerves tingling with hatred, kicking and shrieking. Or had to endure being put on hold where one is hounded every five seconds with the reminder that “your business is very important to us.” Never mind, the horrible spirit-crushing background musak. Musak. Perhaps that was the real beginning of the end. A portent no one recognized.
Having visited India some years ago, I have nothing but pity for the poor men and women who have to politely put up with being yelled at by Americans day in and day out. Does anybody do anything BUT yell at the souls who politely and firmly read from their scripts and listen as we shriek at them? And who must by the standards of their country consider themselves not only lucky but also privileged.
I haven’t visited the Philippines but I’m sure I would feel the same: pity for the people. And guilt when I shriek at them.
Yet what am I to do?
I’m holding for Mumbai, as I type this. It’s been now forty minutes. And when someone finally gets on, it’s going to be ugly. I’m going to yell, and the individual at the other end is going to calmly, implacably read from the script.
We are all so inured to the whole corrupt system where we know that if something breaks, the best thing to do is throw it out and buy another cheap-shit-badly-made replacement and the sooner the better.
Anything, anything is better than being on hold waiting for Mumbai, or wherever it is that I’m calling.
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