Not Saying Nothing

matthue roth
hey! you keep coming up in conversation. you aren't headed this way anytime soon, are you?

Rob Auten
I should be in NYC most of Feb!

matthue roth
!!!!
we should hang out early in the month, then. because when later in the month comes, i will be, ahem, indisposed.

Rob Auten
What does that mean?

matthue roth
there will be a lot of family stuff and sleepless nights
how are you??

Rob Auten
Are you having another kid?

matthue roth
sorry for being obtuse. i'm being extra sensitive to evil-eye stuff because i am weird.

Rob Auten
You should practice being even MORE obtuse then; I had it figured out when you said you were, "ahem, indisposed."

matthue roth
i was being way more obtuse for 8 months!!! i'm glad you kept pushing though. it's good to be back on our game.

Six simple things about today I wouldn't have noticed

1.
I love this book. Love it unconditionally. It's sloppy, and the basic premise is something I would have taken to heart ten years ago and now I look at it through the eyes of someone who tells stories for a living and think, that's not a story, but I remember the person I was when I would have loved it. And that makes me kind of believe in things again like a story about losing your soul and then trying to find it.

2.
Also, when you're reading it and walking down the street, it kind of makes you think things you wouldn't otherwise think.

3.
I got off the train early, returned some library books. One of them was The Pale King, the last novel David Foster Wallace wrote before he died. It's huge, and I barely made a dent in it. Too much stuff going on in my life, I thought, and too many other books to read instead. As I slipped it in the return slot, I wondered what my past three weeks would have been like if I'd been reading The Pale King. How radically it would have changed, my conversations, my experiences, what I chose to do on my lunch breaks and at night, after the kids are in bed, the parts of my life that are still my own. If my life would have changed at all.

4.
I walked fast across the park and down the street to my office. There was this girl walking beside me, also fast. Fast walkers are kind of united in our brusqueness and our no-nonsense attitude, our force of will to get things done, and we all kind of hate each other. This girl and I were walking at exactly the same pace, and right next to each other. We didn't make eye contact at all. She probably didn't even realize I was there. It was me with the book, her with these intense military knee boots and a killer stomp. Sexy boots and a sort of messed-up face, the kind that isn't symmetrical but you can't put your finger on why. We pass a nanny and her kids and we both swerve in opposite directions, then we're right back in line. We hit the corner of my work, she turned right, I kept going.

5.
The subways were psycho today. There was fog, mad fog, and at my outdoor subway station, you couldn't see more than five feet in front of you. People kept staring down the tracks, looking for that ghostly light. It took forever. Ten minutes, fifteen, and then in the fog, a faint yellow pair of eyes, that subway, creeping ever forward. It was packed. We had to force our way on, and then more people forcing their way on. I was one of the last people to actually fit. Or maybe everyone thinks that. At the next stop, this fat kid with a good smile apologized to everyone as he squeezed on, "Sorry, I got to get to work." The stop after that, a fat woman stepped on and literally swished smaller people into each other. I don't mean to call out fat people, I'm sorry it sounds bad, but this morning it seemed like nobody but fat people were even attempting to get on the train. A disembodied woman's voice yelled in our car at each station, "There is no more fucking room!" We all agreed with her. But she sounded more violent each time, and we were afraid to agree. The last stop before we dipped underground, the train stalled for ten minutes. A man's and woman's voices yelled at each other from outside. All the people on the platform, the people who couldn't get in, watched the offscreen drama. Someone said somebody should call 911. I wondered why that person didn't. I wasn't sure if it was really going to get bad, if it was just two people who didn't know each other yelling at each other, or what. I thought about the potential of calling 911 just to say that people weren't getting along, and there were bad vibes everywhere, and could they help out with that. I couldn't call 911. I couldn't reach my phone. My arms were pinned by too many people on every side.

6.
The lobby at my work was, for once, empty. An elevator was right there. A woman slipped into the building just as I was getting on and I held it for her. She hit 6, and then 5. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't realize." "That's okay," I said, "it'll be an adventure." She smiled at me as though having an adventure was the last thing in this world she could conceive of. She smiled at me like she needed an adventure. She got off at 5. The elevator stopped again at 6 and I got ready, instinctively, to step out. Then I realized it wasn't my floor and froze in the doorway. The elevator door held open. The elevator was still. I could have stepped out. Anything could have happened, then, anything in the world.

On slumlords, and slums, and not wanting anyone dead

I completely agree that this morning's New York Post cover is sketchy, and racist, and is basically anti-Semite-baiting creepiness.



But can we talk for one moment about how many Orthodox Jews are running slums and shitty housing operations, and how none of us is saying enough about it?

I'm not going to share the whole story right now. (I'm not.) (My kids are out for an hour, and I'm in the middle of a short story, and although this is burning me up right now, I have to act like writing is my profession and not just listening to whatever the voices in my head are telling me to write about.) But when I was trying to become more observant, and living in Crown Heights, and the only place I could find was a big old tenement on Empire Blvd. -- I was the only Orthodox Jew in the building, and my roommate and I were the only Jews/white people whatsoever -- conditions were atrocious. The halls and stairways smelled like pee. A toilet backup would last weeks before somebody came. You had to wait in line for an hour to hand in your rent check every month, in a dirty office through a glass window. (I wrote this short story about it, although I exaggerated things.) There were roaches the size of hot dogs. One morning I was on a wheezy elevator with a 6-year-old kid, and I stepped on one of those giant roaches, and a mountain of pus oozed out, but he was relieved. (I think he was relieved.)

It stayed there for almost a month, that body and that hardening pus. No other residents would touch it. I kept thinking maybe I should scrape it off, since I was the murderer in question, but I was squeamish, and besides, I kept thinking, I did the good deed in the first place. But, come on. How ridiculous, how devoid of humanity, is it that the landlords and all the people who work for them spent an entire month not going on an elevator in their own building, not even looking inside, and letting all sorts of terrible things happen -- most of which are way more traumatic than a dead squashed cockroach.

I'm not saying that the deceased, may he be remembered in blessing, was one of those people. I'm not saying he didn't do amazing things for other people. But maybe we can do one more act of kindness in his memory, and look at the money we're making from people, and ask just how we've earned every dollar, and if we're truly helping every single person we can.

(Edit: Changed the first line from the questionable "possibly echoes the Holocaust in a really scary and journalistically questionable way" because Yitz and David said it sounded weird and was drawing away from my main point. Thanks for the edits {you can still read about it in the comments below}.)

The thing about writing

The minute you start to think of it as work, it all falls apart. But if you don't think of it as work, you'll never finish anything.

Ghosting

The last girl I danced with was my Aunt Et. It was my sister's wedding. She was 98. Aunt Et was, not my sister. I'd spent most of the time retreating in the corner with my wife, the only two Orthodox people at the wedding, me clapping in a circle with my family at the beginning while the band played the Hora, the lead singer, this black woman in a sparkly nothing dress who pronounced all the Jewish words way too perfectly to actually be Jewish herself, belting out "Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov" while the big baritone sax gave it an illicitly funky bassline.

So then we retreated, and then my wife, who grew up both Orthodox and in a big family, told me, forget it, she was diving in to dance, and I stood on the sidelines alone. I clapped along and plastered this big toothy smile. It felt fake at first, my face muscles contorted too tightly, and then I watched my sister and her husband dancing and it got to be real. This guy was going to be with her forever. Then I watched my wife get roped into the inner circle, the family circle, by my uncle, who officially shouldn't have held her hand, but I think I was the only one thinking about that. My cheeks burned. I felt more and more awkward with every passing moment. I went to check on the kids. I went to get another drink. Then my wife, who'd been at it this whole time, grabbed me and pulled me in.

Flash forward: Almost an hour later, most of the bridal party has retreated to their seats. Even my sister and her husband are taking a breather at the head table. I, meanwhile, am still on the dance floor, dancing up a storm with all the cousins whose names I can barely keep straight. Somebody pushes me to the center. It's just me and Aunt Et. I am way more out of breath than she is. She has way better moves than I do. She's dressed better, too. She wears a swanky white pantsuit and is snapping her fingers above her shiny hair. I try to do the Fiddler-on-the-Roof thing with my feet, because that's as much as I can compete with. We are holding hands. We are laughing and salsaing and trying our best to ignore everyone around us, because they are laughing too, and watching us like we are the only thing on TV, and probably deservedly so. It's the only near-centenarian in the room and the only Bigfoot-bearded Hasidic Jew in the room, and they're reenacting a scene from Pulp Fiction that's itself a reenactment of Saturday Night Fever. This is how our traditions prosper: One hazy memory transmits from one generation to the next, passed like a drunken game of Telephone, or rocked on the dance floor.

It's two years later. My sister and her husband have just had their first baby. And I have just gotten a call: Aunt Et died today.

I'm not really going to process it right now. She's my grandmother's sister, and now she feels like she's a little lonelier in the world, which makes me feel a little more lonely too. And death is one of those things I can't talk about and can't even think about too hard, or else my brain will revert to thinking about something else entirely, and even when I write a book about it I can't even really tell you what I think, or how much I miss the people who aren't around anymore, or think much past the times we've had to think about what they might be doing now. I've never actually seen a ghost. Unless these count as ghosts, in which case, I think I see them all the time.


I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I was a little too emotionally unstable to think about it myself.

Calling out Joyce Carol Oates

I'm not sure if I wrote this as a dare for her, or as a dare for myself.

Got invited to see @JoyceCarolOates at the same time as I have my story workshopped in grad school.

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

I picture going to see @JoyceCarolOates, speaking to her afterward, and her yelling at me that I should have stayed in workshop.

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

Actually, @JoyceCarolOates, it's more like a fantasy. (Though I will probably be responsible. Sigh.)

— Matthue Roth (@matthue) November 13, 2013

(By the way, if you don't have a story due in your grad school workshop, you should go to this. And listen to every word she says, because she is a legend, and then brag about it to me and tell me every word.)