Remy in Heaven

The hello/goodbye: death and dying and being born, sleeping in a field underneath a pile of wet clothes, and the afterlife of a vcr.

2008-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

There is this time seven or maybe eight years ago where I try psychedelic mushrooms for the first/last time, in the middle of a field at the Oregon Country Fair with a girl named Ivy who I don't really know much about except that we are sleeping with the same man. He arrives at country fair with a third girl, a jack-knife come to life, small and frail and severe-faced with dyed-red hair, tired thin bluish skin that always sank beneath her makeup, making it look inexpertly applied and garish, brightly colored scarves tied all over her eighty-some pound frame, and a spine permanently, overly-straightened by surgeries had after she could no longer live with the S-shaped curve that ran the length of it and decided a metal rod from her tailbone to her neck would be better than being permanently curled inward.
She seems sinister and mean and we don't trust her, but we get along with each other alright, so we distract ourselves with everything around us and spend our time working--I juggled, I wore black and joked with the audience and made money in a hat; Ivy sold gardenias from a bowl of water for a dollar each, dressed in fairy wings and face-paint and glitter-- and eating tofu-curry wraps from makeshift restaurants in the middle of the forest and sitting in circles out in back of her family's tent smoking and talking and when her family gives me what was supposed to be his wristband to stay overnight at the campsite, I take it in an instant. My other option being to take the train back to Portland alone, with a hundred eighty-some dollars in street show money, far short of the four hundred I had hoped to make before leaving, camping affords me an extra day to work, and anyway I have shoved a blanket in my prop case, an old samsonite suitcase with a sticker on one side declaring my recent visit to "CIRCUS WORLD! Baraboo, WI", stuffed with balls and clubs and my hat and food and my wallet and ID and a brown suede blazer and now an extra blanket--just in case.
So then we are friends, and it is easier to not be alone.
And then it is night and the Country Fair with the twelve-fifty price of admission and the food booths and the "how-to" juggling tents and the dancing and the bands and babies in pappooses and hippies with money stuffed in macrame clutches is over and all the workers join hands to form a human wall and physically push everyone off the premises who isn't a worker or volunteer or spouse or partner or baby, and when this is done, our man and his severe tiny girlfriend are gone to some hotel to take drugs and have sex and it is dark out, and fire performers come out and Ivy produces a bag full of mushrooms and everyone divides them and I feel too out of place to admit to never having done this before so I watch how much everyone takes out of the bag and then take that myself, and then Ivy and I for some reason divide the remainder of the bag between us and I do not ask about this, I just do it, I am lonely and left-behind and this all makes a good distraction and we watch fire preformers until the mushrooms take over as I am sitting on a hill and suddenly have no intrest in anything except talking to my father, who has been dead, at the time of conversation, for eight or nine or ten years.
I watch a lot of people dance to a several-layers-deep drum circle as my father, bearded and solid and sitting with me, explains how he loves me and my mother loves me and my family loves me but then also unrolls a map and shows me where I am on it, a red dot on a grid of infinitely thin red lines, and shows me where all the people I care about are, all tiny red dots with gaping periods of deep-ocean blue between one another, and shows me, in those blue gaps, the deep distances between us; the hotel where my sometimes-boyfriend is might as well be hawaii might as well be california might as well be heaven or hell; he says, everything is far away and when he tells me I am alone, will always be alone, was born alone, it is already obvious, right there to be read in those vast blue expanses. Hee and I are alike, he says, in that we will always be alone no matter how many people surround us and no matter how hard we try to love others and no matter what lengths we go to be connected.
So I cry, my dead father leaves me in the mass of people and I spottily ride out the bulk of the evening in the care of some found-object-puppeteer who has finally discovered, he says, a suitable afterlife for VHS players and eight tracks and cereal boxes as actors. He does not want to be around me, incoherent and crying, but I can not be alone and he is too-nice and when he tells me to leave and I beg him to let me stay, he lets me.
And then it is grey and fogged in and I wake up in a field. I almost remember going to sleep in the middle of the grass, the tent impossibly far away, a red dot on a mental map stretched further than I could ever possbly keep track of, and crawl out from under my blazer and blanket, neither warm enough by itself, and not warm enough together, into wet grass and fog, 6 am, fold everything back into my prop case, and go crawling out to find breakfast, find that man, who I would later become engaged to, and his bony knife of a girlfriend, find my way back to Portland to re-pack for the next two months traveling. It is all barely there, I am wilted and damp from sleeping in dew and grass and mud and then it has been seven or maybe eight years, and that man has been gone for years, and I am here in Los Angeles on the phone to a recent ex / current friend of mine, fearing going through childbirth alone, afraid no one will be there to help me through.
He says I sound like I am underwater, the way I talk on the phone, and he has always been staticky, and ever since he left, whenever he calls, it feels like a long-distance check in, something just to make sure I am still competent in life and doing fine without him, and as long as I am, he has not really hurt me any by leaving, and he is still blameless.
He tells me to remember, everyone has lives to go through, and even if I do end up giving birth alone, which may very well happen, that doesn't mean nobody cares, it just means I'm alone, I have to get used to the idea that I will do everything alone, anyway.

He is dying very slowly of some strange disease. His body is eating itself.

I know how to be alone. I am safe in that. I have that. I am alone in bed, tonight, with my laptop balanced on my baby-to-be, trying to remember this long slow story well enough to retell it, and I am listening to the radio. I live thirty miles from my friends. Tomorrow I will drive into the city; I have plans with people I care about, and next week my mother will be here for the birth of my baby. This is a big story, all these men stretching off towards who-knows-what, and finding all that will be left in the end is the knowledge that no one is there for you, and I am carrying my baby as best I can for these last couple of weeks, for that little bit more time I will be completely unalone and then I will begin raising my son to love and be loved as that blue gap between us moves from inches to feet to miles and eventually spans over the horizon and I can no longer find his as he moves further from me.

the hello/goodbye: addendum.

2008-05-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

In the last two years, I have built a legitimate life out of a layover.

How to survive two years.

2008-05-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

Wow. Two years later and my life is more-or-less in order; anyway, I am having a baby in three weeks.
Somebody commented at me two years ago to keep telling this story, so I'll fill you in on the bare bones.
Babies turn womens' brains into mush-- the hormones inhibit our normal cognative skills-- so I can't write well right now. I can't think well right now, either. I am frustrated. I know I used to be able to write.

I live along the ocean in long beach. My windows are always open and air sweeps through; right now it's evening and finally cooling off after some weirdly hot day in a string of weirdly hot days after some fog after some sun.

It's been an even steady pace of people cycling through my life. I make friends easily, and some I've kept for ten and finteen and twenty five years. I also make relationships fairly easily (the painter, the wine guy, the pixel-pusher, the wannabe-loser, the graffiti artist) but find them depressing quickly, and do a terrible job of keeping them together. Sometimes I just quit showing up.

I am having a baby. The man it belongs to alternately pretends none of this is happening, calls frantically to tell me how much he hates that I refuse to have an abortion, to tell me how much his girlfriend hates my baby, and begging to talk things over. I ignore him out of anger--it's hard enough to think clearly while pregnant, and it is too difficult to think at all if I am constantly upset-- and anyway, he is like this with everything in life.
In some people, this kind of sudden conviction comes off as passion, but in him it just reads as overly dramatic and unstable.
He pours wine for a living.
For a while, I kicked around the idea that it might belong to an ex of mine, but doctors have confirmed that he is sterile. He wanted the baby.
When he was thirty five, he wanted a vasectomy.
Yeah, so apparently no one can say the same thing from one minute to the next and stay honest forever.

Today in Hollywood

2006-06-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

the hello/goodbye: interlude.

2006-02-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

interlude2: february 2006.
Twenty-five years of travel, and three days ago is the first time anyone has ever asked me to stay.
I've had arguments about not leaving; I mean, my ex-fiacee made a habit out of crying and begging me not to go on shoots that would put me out of the country for the weekend, leaving him alone in the city-- it was unhealthy; it was unbecoming.
I've had plenty of I'll-miss-you-good-luck-take-care-call-when-you-arrive, plenty offighting, but never a simple "stay".
And then it was so simple I almost missed it; heading west on the 10, floating throuh gigantic dying industrial mammoths tattooed in the more clever places with graffitti and murals, somewhere in the middle-blue of evening, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, somewhere in the middle of the freeway; naked little soundwaves bouncing around the car:
"I thhink you sould stay".
"Why?"
"Because I want you to stay here. I mean, I think It's good for you here, too."
...
If it were as simple as a boyfriend asking, it would be as simple as feeling justified in leaving simply because he was too attached.
if it were as simple as a parent asking, it would be as simple as shrugging it off as parental anxiety.
but look, it's as simple as bodies floating through space.
look, it's as simple as momentum, as simple as wiping the hair back from my glasses, as simple as air and the breezes that stir it, inevitably and inexhaustably.
It's as simple as stirring after a rest.
And maybe it is, in the end, as simple as resting, and waking, and lying in bed and feeling the day, unmoving and quiet, but warm and happy.

this jail is real.

2006-02-13T13:16:00.000-08:00

I want to remember jail while it's still fresh and flourescent-lit in the back of my head; so let's talk about Ventura County and inmate 1083458; there's no pillow, oveerflow bunking on lockdown all weekend, there's no food that I won't be sick on; you pee in public, you shower in public; you coccoon in every piece of clothing they give you, body tending towards rigidity in the blue canvas stuff, and try and pretend you aren't just waiting.
I read half of the biography of montgomery clift; he was afraid of growing up, afraid of sex and afraid of love, and then afraid of everything; he hid in alcohol and pills; he hid in twenty years of alcohol and pills; he used to be perfectly fit and sculpted; he drank only milk and ate no sugar; he couldn't understand himself; he abused his perfection until he died.
I skipped ahead; I know he died.
I read the same us magazine, from last october, eight times in between fits of flourescent lit sleeping.
I got paranoid that they would forget to release me, and when scot came to get me, they wouldn't have me there to pick up; they'd keep me until the next day, week, month.
I got paranoid that they'd make a mistake.
Or maybe scot wouldn't be there, and they'd put me back in until there was someone to claim me; I'd be forgotten by someone; I'd end up staying much longer than 48 hours.
And, scariest of all, I'd get picked up for soemm obscure violation of my probation upon release and thrown directly back in.
I was released. I was not taken into custody again. Scot came to get me; he brought cedar and they hid behind pillars so that I got released into a room full of people waiting, and none off them were mine.
I'd had no food inside, so they fed me; I'd had no contact inside; they held me; 48 hours is silmultaneously no time at all and enough to completely destroy my sense of normalcy; they shook me back into feeling real.
It's frightening how quickly jail began feelign normal; I'm no longer afraid of it as a bad place; now I'm afraid of it as a real waste of time; I have a lot that I want to do; I can't do any of it from jail.
It's a nightmare in a whole new way.

the hello/goodbye: interlude.

2006-02-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1, part 6.
Interlude:
January 2006.
My mother is on the phone and counseling me to leave LA; when I hesitate, she responds that I never legitimately chose to live here; that I had a ticket out; that I simply couldn't take it; that LA has been a purgatory rather than a home.
No legitimate life is built on a layover; and any that does so builds itself on the choice to accept that layover place as a legitimate home.

The Hello/goodbye, supplement 2: LA relationship.

2006-02-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1; supplement 2.
There's something about living in a state of chaos that just makes you GUARDED.
The relationship with O. progressed from the midst of total personal chaos. For the duration of our time together, I refused to accept the circumstances of my life: living from house to house, sans career, barely creating, waiting tables and living between ford residual checks, missing my ex in canada, and th whole time, trying to explain to myself that somehow, despite my complete loss of personal identity, that I was doing the RIGHT THING.
I couldn't identify with or undertand the person that I was in california. I had no sense of self, and there was no way I could EVER fully open up to someone else--not that I didn't try, and even think I could, but it was NOT gonna happen. It wasn't gonna happen for O, either; he was in a similar place: he had no sense of self, he had nothing to offer and no way to accept me.
We used our loneliness and depression, combined with our long friendship, as an excuse to try and force a relationship. We did the flowers-on-birthdays and dinner-out and sex thing, and we were okay at it, but we never really tried to love each other; the best each of us could do was try to help each other out, but even that was really, more than anything, just a way to use one another as an excuse to ignore the sorry states of our own lives.
We buried ourselves in each other.
It was a good thing hidden in a pretty bad thing: the relationship left a lot to be desired (love, commitment; hell, almost everything beyond sex and alcohol), but it did begin to feel suffocating, and now that I had a reason for feeling suffocated, however trivial and not-really-the-issue it was, I started to really, REALLY feel the need to figure out just what exactly I was here to DO.

The hello/goodbye.

2006-02-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1, part 5.
Summer 2005.
S. and A. and I all found each other somewhere in the middle of the summer; they used to let themselves into uncle's apartment to steal bagels and use the couches as a place to do homework and make faces at the cat and read the comics; it was basically the same things I did there, except replace homework with the crossword and bagels with peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-tapioca-bread (I have celiacs, so wheat bread is useless except at making me sick). Anyway, one beach invitation (and an unusually stern warning from my uncle that the kids had known too much dissapointment in their lives to have me stand them up) turned into weekly trips anywhere, and eventually a ritual of picking up my pseudo-children almost every day for the rest of the summer, taking them wherever I went (even the dumb stuff; the bank, course registration at mt. sac, whatever), feeding them, getting them home, introducing them to my boyfriend, teaching them violent femmes songs, singing violent femmes songs REALLY loudly in the car, pretending to be interested in deGrassi,et.cetera; the girls are wonderful; S. is eleven and loud and huyper, A. is twelve and sweet and guarded; their baby sister is the heartbreaker; B. is four and she tries to get my boyfriend and I to play parent-child games of house with her; she tries to get us to hold hands as a threesome, she sees families in Claremont and sees us and that we are the right age to be her parents and that there are two of us and one is a boy and one is a girl, and she keeps trying to put all these elements together to make a picture of a family like she thinks families ought to look; everyone in preschool with her is middle-class two-parent; jher best friend is a girl whose parents are one of my regular tables at the press; there are two blonde parents and a blonde child, they order wine with dinner, they have money, they are loud and happy; we don't know who B's father is; he mother looks Italian, but B. is dark-eyed and dark, dark skinned and has long, coarse black hair; she is a beautiful baby; she is happier and quieter, and far, far smarter than any 4 year old I've ever seen.

the hello/goodbye.

2006-02-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1, part 4.
Summer 2005.
the summer is a haze. I've acclimated, at least superficially; I have friends at work, but mostly I spend time with my aunt and uncle, who treat my like their kid. I act like their kid, and it's an easy fantasy to buy into: it's half-fact, half act, but we can deal with that and we kind of like it that way. I love Bob a lot like a parent, he's my father's brother and feels responsible for a lot of what happened to my dad, and consequently, for what has happened and what is happening to me; it makes me miss my father all over again.
All over again, and in a completely different way, all at once.
It seems obvious, in retrospect, that the only way to really appreciate that someone has died is to understand that they were actually ALIVE at some point; Bob had stories about my dad that he HAD to tell me; he had to get them off his conscience, and I really, really wanted to know: they were the reality of my dad's life to counterpoint my dreams of it; a once -mythological figure now seemed very HUMAN, and that makes his death easier to grasp and harder to deal with, all at once. I miss him legitimately now.

the hello/goodbye; supplement 1: heroin.

2006-02-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1, supplement 1.
My father died of a heroin overdose when I was eleven, five days before christmas. I never knew what to do with this information, so I jsut kept compartmentalizing it and moving it around. In retrospect, I was carrying it around whole and unanalyzed, waiting for some new information to contextualize his death, and hopefully make it all make sense.
then I found my family, and a lot came together.

Excerpt: http://blog.myspace.com/remyinheaven

the mental furniture.

--I don't smoke....
Gimme a cigarette.
--Siddown, kid.
If you don't want to hear this, just let me know.

when the wind starts to shift, well, there's no argument...

There are things you can't fight.
There was a long silence and a long conversation; everyone tells me I have no commitment to my father and my family.
Everyone tells me I have every right to walk away.
Everyone is dead wrong.
Hello, my name is Remy, I'll be your waitress this evening. I'd like to tell you about our specials...
My father's presence hovers big and heavy and sways our judgment with a slow, momentous weightiness; if feels just like a big, relevant and all-invasive death ought to feel. I'll always be the dead man's daughter; I feel like I look like some failed experiment in junkie-love.
Time keeps moving and moving and now I get to go back and take the not-so-eleven-year-old view of what happened; It's had 13 years for them to figure out how to color the chain of events leading up to my father's death to save me the hurt; still, everything that was furniture in my tight and sturdy little world has still begun to shimmer and sway, and it's beautiful and frightening and very very sad...

when the wind starts to shift, well, there's no argument...

... so I'll watch it go.
Tell me again that I can turn away from it; I am still half made of this messy stuff.
Look, I won't stay here forever, and I'll look the other way when there's nothing else to see, when it all calms down and I can walk around my life again and recognize where I am, then I'll stop fixating on where I came from; until then, I'll crouch on the floor in the middle of it all and do my best to take it in as the world spins around me and my eyes begin to burn.

I wake up feeling calm and having slept a full night for the fisrt time in weeks; this is going to hurt, but it has to be done, guys.
It's time for change.

April-May 2005:
Bob finally explains about the lat few years of my father's life, and about heroin and prison time for my family.
My father's last major stint in prison, as fari as I can tell, was the result of an arrest that occurred in the middle of a heroin run from thailand via hawaii, where he almost overdosed in 1988 and was arrested upon resuccitation.

Let's contextualize.

We ran from LA to hawaii, without him, in 1987, and had no idea that he had been there in 1988. After leaving LA in 1987, I would never see him again.
My father almost died les than 200 miles from my house, in the middle of the most remote island chain in the world, the place where my mother had taken her family to get away from exactly that sort of thing.
My father was running heroin right past my house, and I never got to see him alive.
Nobody told me.

the hello/goodbye.

2006-02-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

Chaper 1, part 3.
April 22, 2005: Happy 22nd birthday for the third time.
Three weeks have turned into three months and I'm still in California. Two and a half weeks with a boy I don't love at all but need to cling to to stay sane, then a month and a half with my sister on an inflatable matress in the living room of her 6-memebr college apartment, floating by on the ocassional residual chacks from Ford, and then KABOOM and a random email arrives from a cousin who I hand't seen in nearly a decade has found me on Myspace, notices that I'm in LA, and asks if I'd like to go to my grandmother's birthday party; waittaminute, I have a whole FAMILY I've essentially never met living fifty miles from my sister's house, waitaminute, that cousin needs a roommate and doesn't want any rent beacuse I'm family, waitaminute, an aunt has a bicycle I can havve, waitaminute, I've got a job waiting tables, first in a scanty referee uniform serving bad beer to sports fans, then serving vegetarian food to nice people at a lovely little place, I'm laying on a towel in a bikini in the back yard reading the da vinci code and sipping homemade lomonade, I'm prowling the neighborhood on my coaster bike, I have a life; it comes with incredible growing pains (no need to diet; why is my body suddenly 20 pounds heavier, AAAK! my career is really, really over...) (why is that boy who wanted me out of his life still visiting me weekly all the way out here, an hour and 70 miles away)
It's a life.
It's not a succession of couches and air mattresses.
I have a FAMILY.

the hello/goodbye.

2006-01-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1, part 2.
February 3rd, 2005: deplaining from hawaii; short-skirted, high-heeled, skinny legs, new glasses.
I came to LA with the sole intention of staying just long enough to run away to Las Vegas for an alcohol-soaked, MDMA-dusted, sex-covered week with a guy I'd known (and hooked up with on occassion) for the past 6 years; it was meant as a sort of quick, intense catch-up time en-route to New York, where I'd been intending to returning to a career as a model/weight-loss fanatic; I was skinny, a little crazy for the lack of food, and really, really gorgeous.
Twelve hours after my plane landed, I found out that somewhere during my 5-month stint in england/paris/hawaii/canada the previous year, I'd been evicted from my apartment in the city.
I had nothing.
I was homeless.
I was alternately too depressed, afraid, and angry to go back to New york; I'd made a lot of mistakes in the previous year; the apartment was the externalization of a whole phase of my life; now the apartment was gone.
Just... gone.
I had two suitcases; I had sex with a virtual stranger who I was suddenly livingg with and who was getting more than a little anxious about when I was going to leave; I had an ex-fiancee to avoid thinking about, I had a fresh ex-lover in England to mourn, I had a lot of alcohol, I had 30 dollars, I had a phone number for my sister in malibu.
Happy new year, baby.

the hello/goodbye.

2006-01-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

Chapter1, part 1.
Hello. My name is Remy Holwick; I've been in LA for one year.
I've been here for one year, and can say this much: California is a big state.
Not just geographically; it's that, too, California sprawls all the way up the coast until the weather gets too cold for its liking; it drips all the way down until it nearly hangs off the map of the country, it takes up as much space as it wants to, sure, and all that space adds to its bigness, but it isn't the sum total of it.
Everything about California feels heavy with promises and potential; everything here sells itself as a worthwile endavor based on what it can bring NEXT, that's part of the key to its bigness; California keeps hinting at the even-bigger. It's a problem, too; nothing here wants to admit that it is worthwhile in its own right; inherrent value is harder to back up and prove than potential; inherrent value is actual, potential is promised.
It's kind of like living credit.
One year here, and I've decided to move again.
It's like this: I'm absolutely HURTING for something actual; I used to crave potential; I used to be excited by what came next, now I'm starting to crave fulfillment. Forget all that BIG. I want something real.
Vis: My best friend walked away from me last week for the fear that our friendship had too much potential as a relationship, nevermind the actuality of the friendship, and he hates the idea of relationships. (you know, that sounds WAY more absurd written down than it did in my head.)
My ex-boyfriend is quitting the performing arts life he loves for a life of corporate security because he only has eyes for he potential family he doesn't have but can't let down.
Everytime I do some little sribble on a piece of paper, somebody comments on how it could potentially make a great tee shirt, book jacket, full-on painting.
Everybody thinks I have the potential to be a great painter.

It never snows here; it's 45 degrees at night sometimes; fog hangs in the winter air most evenings in costa mesa, where I live in a second-floor studio apartment. It's calm when you cclosse thhe doors and turn up the music; it's okay to forget LA for a while in order to get work done.