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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