The Friend I Never Called

 I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.

Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights, which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.

So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.

Then, last night, this did.

I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:

I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.

She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.

**

Most of my friends, I don’t deserve to call friends. Most of the people I’d like to be friends with, I don’t even talk to. They seem like such magical people, with magical little worlds, and I’d hate to disrupt that with my stammery bad-haired self.

When you know someone even a little bit, they’re limitless. We see tiny glimpses of other people, two-second .gifs of a ten-hour series. Those people we think are our best friends, we’re only with them for a fraction of their lives.

And those people we barely know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know about them.

Alex and I were never part of the same social circle, although we were in orchestra together — Alex was the only cello, and I was a horrible second violinist who sat all the way back at the end of the section, even as an eighth-grader. I thought I would’ve gotten promoted maybe, just out of charity, except that Mr. Meyers was brutal and honest. When Alex played, he had none of the overwhelming praise he saved for Ashley Wilkes who played oboe or Lori Pay, the concertmistress, but she always hit her notes, and that made him proud.

We got along. I probably had a crush on her, but I had a crush on anyone who deigned to talk to me in those days of pimples and squeaky violin solos. More, I always just wanted to be her friend. She seemed like she’d be a good friend. Our lives converged, and then diverged, when she got in an accident with my best friend Patrick. He was trapped in a halo for the next three years, and she emerged relatively unscathed, and maybe I felt guilty being friends with her after that, or felt that I shouldn’t. Or maybe we just had different groups of friends. The Patrick business overshadowed everything, governed most of my social interactions over the next few years (my mom racked up hundreds of miles driving me to the hospitals where they reconstructed his spine). A few years ago I wrote a little book about it and this is one of the things I said about her:

In another life, we could have been sisters or maybe best friends, hiding out at each other’s houses, tumbling into bed and telling each other everything. In this world we were lunchmates, and we shared that with a tableful of other kids. I don’t remember how it first happened, whether she asked if she could sit at our table or if Patrick and I took our seats unobtrusively at the far end of the bench, sliding closer each day, having similar conversations about the same things until one day they finally converged. Pam’s conversational strengths were classical music, cartoons on TV, and what other people were really thinking.

(I changed her name to Pam. Patrick’s name isn’t really Patrick, either. Maybe I just save people’s names for what they sound like they should be doing, or for what I wish they would be doing?)

I should not be surprised, right? The opioid epidemic is everywhere. It’s hitting all kinds of people. According to the articles, this is kind of person Alex was:

She worked as a therapist with women and children in crisis, kids who were being raised amid abuse and addiction. It was hard work, emotionally taxing, and Alex often internalized it.

Alex loved the beach and the mountains. She was forever dancing, listening to and talking about music — everything from trance to Tori Amos, classical to Alicia Keys.

“You’d be walking through the mall and she’d see someone and say, ‘He looks like a really interesting character. I want to meet him,’ ” Sarah said. And she did.

Alex was an original — quirky and complicated, restless and gifted. Her parents didn’t give her a middle name at birth, but Alex declared one for herself, Victoria. She liked the way it sounded, cool and feminine. She started spelling her own name Alecks, just to be original.

**

I don’t want to quote the whole article — every little paragraph of it is another little treasure — although, maybe, I do. I didn’t know her that well. Some of the people the reporter spoke to, I vaguely knew (most of them, I knew as the kids on the other side of the classroom, the ones who were either way cooler than me, or not as cool as me, depending on how you felt about Dungeons & Dragons as a way to spend a Saturday night). The only one I knew was Alex, and I barely knew her.

Are we drawn to death because it reminds us of ourselves? Is it what these people meant to us, or didn’t mean to us, or because we’re hitching a ride on their final journey, wanting to claim some of the glory of it for ourselves, or some of the pain, to use it to define us, to make ourselves martyrs so other people feel sorry for us, so they feel jealous of us, because we have touched a piece of the infinity of this person that can no longer be touched? I read that, when someone dies who knows you, a tiny part of yourself dies along with them, the things you shared with them that you didn’t share with anybody else, the way they experienced you, which no one else will ever have the exact same experience.

If that’s the case, Alex barely took any of me when she died. And the parts of her — the microscopic, insurmountable parts of her I carried — are contained more in that article than anything I can write.

You know how I said that, even when you barely know someone, you don’t even know what you don’t know about them? I just want to tell you about the person who wrote the article. In middle school, she was one of those cooler than/not-as-cool-as people. We were definitely friendly and definitely not friends. Maybe she wore shirts with sports teams on them and I scoffed at her. Maybe I wore shirts with sports teams on them, hoping people didn’t think less of me because I was in camouflage.

Let me tell you what she does today. She’s a reporter for the Philly Inquirer. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s a reporter — she uses the paper as a platform to show how public schools are fighting dropouts and raising prodigies and how a ghetto school went a year without fights. I think of what she’s doing and I tremble. I feel reverent. I think of the once-a-month phone calls I make to my state senator, the stories I write that try to make people laugh — it’s necessary, I know, but with the few people I make feel a little better, I wish I could figure out how to do as much straight-up good with my life as her.

Is that hubris? Chutzpah? A wish to touch more other lives, and my own basic egocentrism? Or is it that same feeling we get when people we know die, wanting to absorb their life’s glory into our own?

It is neither, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it’s covetousness — the kind we talk about in the Bible, the kind that’s not I wish I had that but how can I get one too, the kind where we see greatness and it inspires us to do great things. It’s been eons since I’ve talked to a stranger but maybe I should. It’s been forever since I’ve put on Tori Amos, since I’ve listened to music that made me dance without thinking about it. Our long winter is over. Maybe I should.

 

photo by Bostankorkulugu

Sympathy Pains for the Speaker’s Stand

I wrote a new poem! Go here to read the whole thing. Usually I write (well, usually I try to write) on paper, because I take more time with each word, the physical effort of it. Today I had too much to do, and I just opened the posting screen and let the poem all fall out. I knew exactly the image that it should have, but by now (January 2021, still a week after the Capitol insurrection) we're all sick of that image. A little creative Googling, and I found this. Felt right. And just enough of a twist on the original image. (I tried to find a source for it, but couldn't. Whoever created it, fait accompli.)

Anyway, here's the poem.

I’ve been drinking soup out of mugs in the morning
calling it coffee
stretching my mouth wider so that
nobody notices the noodles

These days I feel so sorry for the world
everyone is upset about a faraway foreign government
being overthrown in Washington
I’m just like, at least it’s not your family

This morning my flavor of coffee is my own anxiety
and I’m blowin’ on it right now cause it’s too hot
Needing the simple on/off switch of caffeine
while everything else is too unreliable

Feels a little too much like an abandoned store
at the end of an apocalypse, mobs of moms and incels
ransacking baseball bats and canned vegetables
while I’m patiently waiting in a line that never advances

Me, I’m nothing
selfless self-important something stuck on the way to salvation
trying to feel the pain of the universe
and drown out my own while I’m at it
Me I’m nothing          and I like it that way

Monument Valley, a poem

Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone
each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement

nails across the blackboard 
of my sleep.

Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do
then drive myself crazy till sunset.

Freed prisoners will commit a crime
to return to the solace of jail.

I’ve been listening to music by dead people
hoping to set their souls at ease

though it might be because there’s nothing
I want to listen to.

Tonight I am having trouble surrendering
to the night, my body quaking 

with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect
from the maelstrom of my head

How I wish for something diagnosable
The ability to put a limit to my problems, say this is it

draw a box around them
then step outside it

G-d just seems to never want tonight to end
I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars

Wondering what happens if I start walking among them
and don’t stop till I reach what comes next


______
Image from page 138 of The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend (1919)

There Is Always a Graffiti Maker

This is part of a story I've been writing for, yikes, way longer than it should have taken me. If you want, you can read from the beginning, or just start here.

< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >

In Flagstaff we checked the mileage, realized Albuquerque was only four and a half hours away. That was basically less than 2 movies. That was a tiny slice of our days. We had the longest days, didn’t we?, especially waking up early, the sun shoving through the sheer curtains in the motel room, having forgotten to smush the normal curtains closed.

Not that it mattered, because Joey kept us on schedule anyway. Joey was our matron, our den mother, our sheep dog and our shepherd and our team coach all in one: landing on top of me in the morning, then bounding over to Elyse’s bed, slopping his tongue over our faces and digging his nose into our armpits and reminding us in great amounts of glorious slobbery slime that it was time for his morning walk.

I loved walking Joey. He was no higher than my waist, but strong, always with a determination and a clear direction. Later that year, in summer, once I had made it to the East Coast and moved in with an Orthodox aspiring hip-hop DJ in a warehouse deep in Hasidic Williamsburg, I would learn from rendezvouses with kids in pizza places and kosher markets that Hasidic kids, by and large, dreaded dogs. The families had so many kids that there was no money to have pets, and no space. It puzzled me so, since the only way I managed to get up in time for morning prayers was Joey. Caring for a dog was so much like being a religious Jew: this constant presence, nagging but righteously demanding, diverting your attention away from the ego and reminding you of the miracle of Creation and the demands of a higher power.

We circled back to the row of crystal shops. They were slowly opening up, one by one, like heavy eyelids rustling up motivation after a heavy sleep. The first we entered was almost a clothes boutique for crystals, a well-dressed if slightly ’80s-looking woman who inquired what we were looking for, which colors or styles or what we wanted to correct in our lives. “Just browsing,” I half-muttered, half-swallowed up, those instincts honed in me since teenagerhood of being in stores solely to have somewhere to be, never any interest in actually buying something. To my surprise, Elyse said, quick and guilelessly, “I’m looking for a love spell.”

“Sure, I can show you our love potions section,” said the woman, taking us down an aisle whose shelves were sparsely populated — or was it generously spread out? — with caterpillar-like crystals crawling their way across stone, gorgeously smooth stones the softly postuled shape of breasts, with a breastlike incline and curve, with intensely spiny knifelike undersides full of sharp crystal.

“Now, are we looking for a gift for a lover, or a spell to arouse the interests of someone who hasn’t yet fallen under your thrall?”

“A gift,” said Elyse coyly.

They narrowed it down to two: a darkly spiraling purple cone and a sort of cotton candy pinkish-white bowl-shaped structure. Both were distinctly more femme than anything I’d identify with Elyse, and it made me wonder about this trip, this mysterious endpoint of hers, who she might be and what sort of life might lie after these few weeks for Elyse, for Joey.

She settled on the purple cone. The woman boxed it up, and sinking into the pillowing tissue paper it looked like Darth Vader’s evil castle tucked inside a nest of peaceful clouds. As we walked by the other stores, we couldn’t avoid window-shopping, or second-guess window-shopping, which is what you do when you’ve already bought what you set out to buy but you can’t help thinking, was it the right choice, and what if, and would they take returns. I caught sight of the proprietor of one other establishment, a hippie woman in a long flowing skirt with her hair tied in a dangling thin cloth, skin the color of the desert sand, watching me as I watched her. I had on a baseball cap over my yarmulke and I couldn’t help thinking, does she know I’m Jewish? And then, is she?

I asked Elyse if she wanted to stop anywhere. She said no, and we kept walking.

We hung out in a park with gorgeously sinister graffiti tags and waited for the people who’d made them to pass by. The town had a newspaper filled with punk-band ads and snarky personal essays, but no cool kids, no outcasts, barely anyone on the street. We lay in the grass all afternoon while Joey went wild trying to scratch his belly with his nose. It didn’t work, and we didn’t find anyone. We didn’t know who we were looking for, but once they showed up, we’d be able to tell.

The town was heating up, and the sun was just starting to lick the horizon, when we thought of dinner, and of the road. Joey stretched in the grass. Elyse checked the time.

“Uh, Matt,” she said. “If we stop for dinner, we aren’t going to get there till eleven thirty.”

I checked my watch. Sure enough: the day had gone, and what felt like early evening in this temperate desert town would long ago have been nightfall anywhere else.

We grabbed fast food (her: actual McDonald’s, me: peanut butter and a loaf of bread from the mini mart where we got gas), ate in the outdoor seating, then hit the road. We were both from the East Coast before this, but had spent so long living in California that the existence of other states seemed like a tease. When we passed a sign saying we’d entered New Mexico it felt like an event. And when we realized it was still a good number of hours till Albuquerque, the next city on our agenda, we slowed down and started giving the icons on the highway exits more serious attention.

Soon, we realized that was not the optimal plan. I dug out a AAA manual and started flipping pages. The only motel we could find didn’t allow pets. “It’s only an icon on a page in an old book,” I suggested. “Maybe they do in real life.”

We got there and there was an even bigger sign on the door. But the place looked so picturesque, it seemed a cruel lie. It was one of those motels where the doors had pastel colors and different numbers. The office was in its own cabin, wooden with a triangle roof, built into the side of a cliff. We sat in the car and debated whether to go in and ask, not say anything and try to sneak Joey in, or keep driving. Driving was out of the question. It was late, we were tired, and there were no buildings at all on the horizon, let alone a motel with vacant rooms.

Inside it was homely. Red velvet curtains. Framed family photos. The woman at the desk looked like a Golden Girl, her hair plastic and symmetrical, sweetly wrinkled jowls of cheeks. Her voice was the sweetest thing, and I would swear she knitted her sweater herself. She gave us a look when Elyse said two beds — we were getting used to that — and when she walked away, I whispered to Elyse, “Let’s just ask.”

Elyse looked on the verge of agreeing with me. Right before the woman returned, she hissed to me, sidelong, without making eye contact, “Just don’t.”

“Here are your keys,” said the woman, slipping them across.

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll just get the bags and unpack.”

On the way out the door, I said to Elyse, “What’s wrong?”

“That,” she nodded across the counter at the wall.

There, in the center of dozens of family photos, was one with a more elaborate frame, gold, with gilt covering and a sort of genuflectable position. It was of President George W. Bush, and it was autographed. Bush, of course, had been on the radio all week, a vote on gay marriage was up, he was promising to reject it. His rejection, as we drove deeper and deeper into the country, and left the ocean farther and farther behind, was celebrated more and more, and its implications were darker and darker.

The woman at the counter, apparently resolved to our cohabitational weirdness, offered up a gentle wave as we left. I went into the car, slung a suitcase over my shoulder and held another at my side. Elyse quietly, quietly cuddled Joey against her, kept pace with me, and together, we slipped into the room.

< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >

The Beauty of Being Disappointing

Last night we were one week and five days into the seven-week, seven-day cycle of counting the omer, our contemporary verbal gesture toward the ancient pentecostal offering of a sheaf of ripe grain with a sacrifice immediately following the commencement of the grain harvest and the First Fruits festival (that smart-sounding text lifted unapologetically from Wikipedia).

Anyway, if you don’t know: each night, starting on the second night of Passover, going till the eve of the Feast of Weeks, we count, out loud, the number of the night. Each one represents a combination of kabbalistic emanations. Each one can heal a different part of your soul. And the theory is, after 49 days, you’ll heal your whole self. And each night, as long as you haven’t missed a day, you say a blessing.

The past few years, in spite of my normal everyday forgetfulness — or perhaps because of it — I’ve been exceedingly vigilant about counting omer, every night, with a blessing. The past few years (oh, hey, maybe it’s already up to the past several years) I’ve made it all the way to Day 49. I’ve signed up for alerts from both Chabad.org and MyZmanim.

And this year — in spite of my vigilance of the past few years, or perhaps because of it — I screwed up.

On the very second night.

It was Shabbos. It was the dead center of a three-day yontif, without electricity or internet or text alerts or friends or walking to shul or the grouchy guys in the back of the shul.* It was a little bit of a personal whirlwind, and a little personally tempestuous.

Look, I’ve been through much worse — including kid-related incidents and accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents in the middle of evening prayers — and I still managed to get the night’s count in.

But this year, the seder became an all-consuming tsunami. How am I going to get all this stuff done? am I going to order food from a caterer, when usually we make everything by hand, down to ketchup and chips? how can I afford it? do they not do delivery? can a taxi pick it up? how do I bridge the distance between the store, who will only bring the order to the door, and the taxi driver, who will load it into the car but won’t go to the door? what are we going to do for a three-day period of no electricity, video chats, or Hamilton dance parties?

It was so stressful. It was so wonderful. It was so intense that after the seders, there was nothing to do but sink into the sad silence of aloneness, reading too much and waiting for the books to talk back to me, trying to suck meaning out of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Particulars of Rapture because it’s the closest I have to a dvar Torah, I was trying to ignore my thoughts, my obsessions, my brain in overdrive.

And, I guess, also ignoring that overlap of the rational mind and the free-associative where I ask myself at some point each day, have you counted yet? And then course-correct when I haven’t.

Sometimes I forget to count until the next morning. Occasionally, I forget until later that day. This is the first time in a long time that I’d forgotten, not yet back into the rhythm of things, into any rhythm in these chaotic times where nothing is normal, until the entire next day.

The first few days, post-blessing, my count felt supremely ineffectual. Like, since I’d forgotten to heal that one particular aspect of myself (it was the kindness of stringency, dammit! Maybe if I’d gotten the kindness of stringency down, I would’ve been able to get through the 47 subsequent gates!), all the other healings are closed off to me. I spent a day and a half feeling crushed, a bombed-out feeling of squashed-ness that comes to me entirely too often these days, like when the list of mourners at my synagogue is a dozen people long instead of one or two, or when my tefillin were stolen — this idea that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something I both needed to do and was simultaneously unable to do.

Or the things I should’ve done at my desk the last day of work before quarantine, before we knew what the world would turn into. Or the ways I’ve rephrased saying things in my head a million times, or the ways I’ve tried to redo things, or undo things, that are now irrevocably done. There are the things in our lives we can control, the things we can’t, and the things we could have, and we didn’t, and now we just have to suck it up and make it better, deal with all the shtuss that’s being flung at us and treat each piece as peacefully as we can.

I can still count. I do still count, once a day, usually during prayers, sometimes not till after. I don’t say a blessing.** And it feels like I’ve lost that potentiality, that mitzvah I could have fulfilled, and could still be fulfilling right now, a moment that’s forever gone, like a saccharine meme of a butterfly darting away from fumbling fingers.

On the other hand, it’s a gift — a gift of a different sort. I know there’s no way I’ll complete my 49-piece set. But now each day I count is a fractured mitzvah that I’m still trying to give wings to, an imperfect beauty that I hope is still beautiful. Last year, each night I counted sefira was a rung on an ever-increasingly delicate ladder, and somehow, miraculously, I made it all the way to the top.

This year, knowing I’ve already failed, each rung can be its own journey. Beauty, glory, victory, kingship — each of these sefiros is both simultaneously un-understandable to me and eminently observable, like a giant dragonfly I’ve been chasing, who’s gotten away, whose shadow now falls over me in completeness. Or who buzzes in front of me, and I can see each vibration of its body, each tremor of its wings. I can appreciate it in a way that I never could have if I was trying to catch it.

I wish I hadn’t missed the count. I hope next year I’ll be able to remember each night — I also hope, by the way, that we can all actually be around other humans on Passover, and that we’re all healthy, and that we spend it with the people we’re meant to. For this year, however, I know we’re in exile, and with the taste of that bitterness in my mouth, I’ll try to do each day’s count as its own flawed worship. A worship that might not be quite worthy of a blessing, but still is what G-d wants me to be doing, but still is all that I can do.

__
* — I feel completely at liberty to complain about the grouchy guys in the back of the shul, as I have of late, in my middle-aged complacency, become one of those very same grouchy guys.
** — Actually, according to the Komarna Rebbe (and according to my friend Alan), I can still count with a blessing. But according to most authorities, including the ones I hold by, I can’t.

It's a Whole Spiel launch party!

Hey! My story "Find the River" is about to be published in the collection It's a Whole Spiel, alongside luminaries like Alex London and David Levithan and Mayim Bialik. Hopefully I'll be able to share an excerpt soon! But if you're around NYC on Sept. 17, you can hear a whole bunch of us get out our pre-Tishrei rage at Books of Wonder. It's free!