reading, writing, thoughts, things
The reading goes well. I don’t remember what I do the week before. I am on the phone with my mother. On the phone with friends in other countries discussing the summer. I am not “in the now” as they say, but the reading goes well.
The day of I wake up at 6:15 because I want to have time to shower and do some kind of power pilates before my intern is to arrive at 9:30 sharp. By 10:00 I am screaming at her on the phone for fifteen minutes while she is telling me that she is brushing her teeth. At 10:15 I walk outside, I know it’s cold, I think it may be raining and I am not sure if I’m really dressed and hand a cab driver twenty bucks. My friend Gregg (who complains that I never write about him) has a friend, Alex, staying with him from Portland and he walks over right before I can find reason to yell at Jayme. I hand Jayme a copy of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and tell her to type up the parts I’ve highlited, I also hand her a stack of pages that I’ve hand written you know just in case I change my mind about what I want to read within the course of the next eight hours. Alex and I walk to the diner where we eat sandwiches &owners &patrons alike help me plot out how the evening will unfold. I am nervous &I am not sure. I am nervous and I am not sure.
I hold a pillow. I am a horrible friend.
The reading goes well. The reading goes really well. My friends come and my professor and some strangers. The restaurant is packed and I am slightly terrified. The tables have mason jars filled with gin and there are pitchers of Shirley Temples. I turn on a tape recorder. I feel like I am doing theatre— so it is very convenient that Tyson Savoretti— one of the best stage actors I’ve ever met in my twenty-four years of life walks up to me and says “do you want me to introduce you?” The room is loud— everyone is talking and I must nod or something because Tyson commands attention. He is very good at grabbing the attention of a room. We went to high school together. He knows how to project, to voice without a microphone, and luckily, so do I.
After I start reading, I realize it doesn’t feel like reading, it feels like more like performing. It feels good because I wrote all of it and all of it is true. I say “this is about me” or “this is about someone else” and plates of chicken and waffles and pulled pork sliders and cheese sticks come out. I talk over the kitchen and the slamming doors and I like it. I really like it. Jay and Kari are in front of me and they clap the loudest. My class from monday night is at at a table in the back of the room. Some people I have known for a decade, some I’ve never met before in my life.
I go on and on about men being monsters and the Catholic Church and what Florida can do to anybody and I talk desperately out to the crowd about what’s it like to go North to get South. It feels good.
It feels good and I feel grateful. I did nothing but think out loud basically, but it feels good. I feel grateful. I can do nothing but read and write but somehow this balances out. Somehow everyone groups together to help me pull through. At twenty-five dollars a seat the room is full and afterward it is good to hug everyone to hear what they have to say.
I wrote it and I read it. I can be awful, I can be truly terrible, I can be motionless, but I can project.
