the habit of being

To the Gallery:

I came looking for Nan Goldin photographs in a sea of graffiti and acrylic cartoon. There were only three. One for every dollar I paid in admission. Trixie on the cot is my favorite. A beautiful sort of ballerina junkie whore sits near passed-out in her 80’s party gear. Tulle and neon shoelaces against cigarettes and beer, amidst the butts and cans they shed. Our herione (maybe she’s on herion) is all slender wrists and tight angles.

All around are transvestites and glitter. On one screen is Karen Finley, safely behind earphones performing a one-woman reenactment of being finger-fucked on the subway. The bastard left her hangin’. On another, hidden in a corner, a woman is raped by many hands while calm and flute-like eyelash-batting geisha music plays sweetly over her shrieks. A crowd gathers to watch as a breast is shaken in a long nipply wiggly close-up. I stand up.

There is free beer in the lobby.

On the Subway:

A tall white man and an even taller black woman are hugging around a hand-hold pole. He kisses her softly and an asian youth wearing headphones while leaning against the door you’re not supposed to lean against makes a face.

A French couple smooshes up their vowels over a map of Manhattan. An MTA employee asks them if they’re visiting and they say yes, then he asks them where they’re from and they say France the French way. He says, France the English way? They nod. He disappears into his little room at the end of the train, then comes back after the next stop and asks them if it’s their first trip to New York, very slowly, as if he’s talking to children.

To the Reading:

I am pushing down my pink legwarmers in a sweltering chain bookstore, very early for the reading. The old floor creaks as hipsters trot by, toting tomes. My latte gets cold by my side. A girl with cottoncandy hair passes.

On the way here, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in three years. We stared at each other for seconds, then hugged in the sidewalk. I said “I still have your copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and we exchanged e-mail addresses. When I gave him the two second recap of My Life Up Till Now, he said “You’ve done interesting things.”

Stephen Elliott is a somewhat timid reader. As he leads up to the lines about childhood anal rape, his forehead gets shiny. The bookstore is even more sweltering than before.

To the Thai Place:

These is a virtual revolving door of couples on first dates at the two tables two inches to the left and to the right of Leigh and me. They are talking about something. We are talking about something. I picked the restaurant, but I did not think. The music is too loud, the temperature is too high, the mod decor is too mod. The smell is so overpowering I’m already envisioning myself vomiting on the R. Puking on the subway, like abortion, is a fate one really shouldn’t have to suffer more than once.

The lefthand couple gets up to leave. The girl has a lip ring and dyed-black hair but somehow avoids looking sixteen. She says one thing she’s not used to is this constant layering-up. Perhaps she’s a recent transplant from California. Her date is clean-cut, unpierced and blonde. He says laying is essential, otherwise you’re fucked.

They’re replaced almost instantaniously.

Down the Street:

Walking down 22nd, one first sees houses and houses, expensive residential, and then auto garages and diners, somewhat menacing in the dark, and all of a sudden the street breaks into song - gallery spaces with green and blue windows, a warehouse door vibrating with the club music it struggles to contain.

The snowpiles leak snotty lakes out over the black street, spreading the Terror of Falling Down. Metrocards float along in the muck. The sidewalks are pockmarked by long-blackened chewing-gum buttons - moles from the mouths of a century’s smirking adolescents and bubble-blowing girls in miniskirts.

My breath, too, is thin and white.

To the Theatre:

I imagine all the ticket-checkers look up to me a little, with my second-hand front-row-centers.

My best girlfriend in elementary school was a Mormon with long blonde pigtails and blue eyes. We got matching notes on our report cards saying we were great students but that we Talked Too Much. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that having nice hair-ribbons was really important. Becky always had nice hair-ribbons. Nicer than mine. So nice no one could tell she lived in a trailer park. Not even me.

In middle school, we both played the flute. We would call each other up on the phone and practice, taking turns listening and playing into the receiver. She was better at it than I was. When we did our duets for Solo and Ensemble competition, she always played the top part while I played the bottom. At concerts, I was third chair, while she was second. (The first chair girl, Olivia, was not our friend. She was some red-haired Flute Goddess from another planet.) In the gifted program, QUEST, we wrote a paper together, about Cleopatra. We confessed to one another our fears of Being Fat And Ugly.

She gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon once, with some of the good parts hi-lighted and sticky-noted. She said I didn’t have to read it or anything, it was just something she had to do for her church, and it was because I was her friend. I didn’t think Mormons were any stranger than any other Christians, except the part about not being able to drink Coke, and I went to potluck dinners at the LDS church with her sometimes. When, around age 13, I confessed to her I was not only Not Christian, but a Wiccan high-priestess in an online coven, she was fine with it. Though I knew she was more than a little annoyed about her family’s strict rules about dating and caffeine, when Joseph Smith would later came up in our US History class, Becky was the first to raise her hand and proclaim without a shred of embarrassment that she was a Mormon and that polygamy wasn’t allowed anymore by the church’s constitution.

By freshman year in high school, I’d started wearing all black, and she’d joined the cheerleading squad. I was listening to the Sisters of Mercy, and she was listening to Celine Dion. I spent all my free time on the Internet, and I don’t know where she spent hers, because I’d pretty much stopped hanging out with her outside school altogether. We were both unpopular enough that we relied on each other to Sit With At Lunch, but whatever it was we’d had to talk about so much in elementary school, we definitely didn’t have anymore. She had a reputation at school for being stuck-up and snotty, but when it came to the downfall of our friendship, she was neither and I was both. She never cared that I was wearing fishnets and feather boas and pentagram necklaces to school, but I cared that she was doing anything but. Before long she stopped taking all honors courses and traded in band for chorus, and we barely communicated except to write long notes in one another’s yearbooks come May.

I formed much stronger friendships in the latter years of high school, but Becky and I still hugged and cried at graduation. I went off to New York, while she, despite her Dream of Becoming a Broadway Singer, stayed in Statesboro and enrolled at the local school as a music major. We never spoke again.

Last night I Googled her name and found her email address. She wrote back immediately. It turns out that she hated being a voice major, just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, is dating a professional poker player, and will be moving to Las Vegas in a month. I asked her how long her hair is now, and I really, honest to God, am dying to know.

“Your Home is where I am,” my mother tells me, defensively and gently, if I slip-up and refer to my apartment in New York or the town in Georgia where I grew up by the hallowed H-word. “You might think you’re walking home from work now, but your real Home is right here.”

So, For the holidays this year, for the first time, I went Home, not to Statesboro, but to Frederick, Maryland, a city where no building can be built taller than the church spires, and everything is named after Francis Scott Key. I went Home to the Francis Scott Key Hotel, which isn’t really a hotel anymore, but has to keep up the illusion of being one because it is a Historic Site. Visitors stop into the lobby on tours, where they might see such relics as the origami ornament my little brother made for the Community Tree. Horse-drawn carriages frequently pass by on West Patrick Street, and my parents’ cocker spaniel barks at them from their window three storeys up.

If The Francis Scott Key were really a hotel, I probably could’ve gotten my own room. But since it isn’t, I got the couch.

Though my mother and I have a pact never to Frenzy (that is: clean up the house) for one another, when I arrived on Christmas Eve Eve, the Pigsty Factor was low. The Tree, as promised, was Fat and Bushy and ready to be decorated. It was past Cocktail Hour, so my stepfather made us all a drink before we commenced with the Oohing And Aahing At Ornaments. Each colored ball, wire-footed bird, glass pear, clip-on penquin, and popsicle-stick reindeer was contemplated and tested on multiple branches before coming to rest in that Perfect Spot. I topped off our holiday greenery by placing a long skinny turkey feather into the hands of the Angel On Top. A slightly crooked plume reached up for the ceiling. I flopped down with my Vodka and Red Bull, stared at our tree: It was Good.

The next day, the presents, wrapped in white paper, tied with everycolor ribbon, tagged with such slogans as “To Mule, From Nag” and “NO-fucking-EL,” were shaken. Bribes for hints were made. I brought up, again, that The European Method is to open the gifts on Christmas Eve Night, rather than waiting All The Way until Christmas Morning. My fourteen-year-old brother admitted that those Europeans are pretty smart. Maybe because there was no Santa business this year, or because perhaps we’re all old enough now to admit to one another that we have no self control, despite my stepfather’s protest that Europeans Are Gay, we started digging into the goods at approximately 1:30am. For me, there were cashmere and Calphalon, chocolates and cash.

My primary role in the present-buying operation is making my mother’s Stocking. None of the men in the family have ever successfully managed to get her anything she actually wanted, perhaps because they don’t understand the intrinsic differences between $10 candles from Wal-Mart and $40 candles from Saks. And so I come in, NYC Shopping Fairy, with my tiny Kate’s-Paperie-wrapped extravagances, and every year she tells me it’s the Best Stocking Ever.

After all the Opening was said and done, and the Pigsty Factor was through the roof, there were still Five More Days. I settled into my role as The Daughter On The Couch, while spoons were accidentally dropped in the garbage disposal, calls to relatives were made (Well, butterbeans are butterbeans, Daddy, but if you’re sick, you need to be home in bed. Grandmother’s feelings would be more hurt by your risking your health than by your missing her cornbread), 20+ hours of West Wing episodes on DVD were watched, and squash casserole and endless red potatoes were eaten.

We are a family into Playing Games. On our computers, my mother and I took up Mah Jong Solitaire, the Daily Jigsaw, and InkLink. On the livingroom table, there was poker, spades, Monopoly, and The $25,000 Pyramid. The Pyramid often caused fits of riotous laughter rather than correct answers. For example, Me, when you’re not strong; Anything, if you’re James Dean; Guardrails, except you’re not supposed to; and Carrie, if you’re Miranda walking down the aisle at your mother’s funeral; were all failed attempts to get at THINGS THAT ARE LEANED ON.

My parents decided to get a head start on Quitting Smoking Again for the New Year, so globs of chewed Nicorette gum started appearing all over the apartment: on the kitchen counter, on the lid to my little brother’s acne cream by the bathroom sink. I even caught the cocker spaniel crewing a piece once, neglecting the New Duck he’d been given for Christmas (to replace his Old Duck, with its beak chewed off). The dog was also a fan of Cocktail Hour, knocking over drinks whenever he could. Maybe if he’d done a better job of hijacking mine, I wouldn’t have tripped on the way back to the poker table and hurled a cup of chocolate pudding all over his back.

We didn’t leave the house at all, expect to get the Traditional Christmas Ritz Carlton Shrimp Cocktail (at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, rather than Buckhead, Atlanta, this year). My back hurt from the couch-sleeping, and I was aching for a door to close myself behind. But even though I was soon counting the hours until I could get back to New York and My Life, it was impossible to deny that my mother was right: even in this little city that was never my own, because my family was there, I was Home.