Hot off the presses: A New Short Story

Of Human Consciousness

`It is the hat that matters most,` she said, as she careened forward, nearly missing being hit by a Hermes-like bicycle delivery guy.  `If the hat is not designed historically correct, then the whole costume will be off and all the purists will notice.  That, I can guarantee you.`  She was walking with Benton down Massachusetts Avenue on a sunny late afternoon.  Sun in the city seems a rarity. And Benton.  What in the world would she do without him? He has been here for me.  That he has. Not in a way that I would expect to need him, but the way he came to me years ago and filled in as that missing puzzle piece in my life, I could have never expected.  Benton was a surprise, a gift.  The kind of gift someone gives you, and you wonder, `What could they mean?`.  Later on, you understand exactly what they meant.  They were anticipating your needs, which is quite a gift in itself.   

            They quickly made way across the street at the crosswalk, headed in the direction of the sun and the production company they have been working for. She looked him up and down as she followed behind him.  He was wearing his usual attire: J Crew khakis and a crisp white shirt, but he always managed to look so fresh. No matter the weather, his hair was perfectly cut and styled, and his shoes, polished to an opaque shine.  His body was like a metrosexual marble statue, created just to express the 21^st century human ideal until the end of time.  One wonders if he sits at home when not working and preens like a peacock, cleaning his feathers for the next conquest. It is a technique that has been well-proven to produce the optimum results.

            A Chinese lady with a hot dog cart is stuck on the curb. She hurries over to help her lift it up and onto the sidewalk. Pamela notices she is wearing a pair of those soft black cloth mary janes with the rust colored soles that were one of those coveted exotic Chinese finds of the youth back in the 80`s.  Hers were old and the backs of the shoes were crumpled into accordions, her pink socks permanently grey from months or even years of splashing puddles and the tenacious grime of the road.  Benton continues to walk, oblivious to anything happening around him. Typical Benton: his legs mechanically working like the geared mechanisms in a factory assembly line. They just never stop.  She laughs.  `Would you wait a second?` She rushes forward in her high heels, still nimble and balanced at the mature age of 48.  `Ok we are not late.  In fact, we are early! Where are you rushing off too?` She is a bit perturbed, but used to it.  Benton is a man on a mission.  Any mission, he is there and will not fail. She catches her breath beside him and says, `As I was saying, we need to emphasize the fact that this film will be different.`  `I know, Pam.  I heard you the first time.  Do you doubt me?  I would think you would know by now that I have no trouble giving you what you want.` She grumbles.  `Ah, but sometimes, you are much too confident.  That is what worries me right now.  I get the feeling that you are not as serious about this project as I am.`

            The last project they worked on together was a disaster to finish.  The final product was breathtaking and wildly innovative, but the journey through completion was a horror.  So many details left undone at the last minute, so much rushing and so many complicated transactions going on. It made her head spin.  He makes her head spin. She did not want another one of those projects.  She was determined to lead this one.  Benton will just have to follow her lead.   She will make sure of it. Somehow, she wonders, will I be eating these words? Benton is one brilliant force to be reckoned with.

            Benton was similar to someone, she thinks to herself. How funny life can be.  One person leaves your life because you realize that they were no good for you and the `trying harder` part was only leaving you completely emptied, then another comes along and is so similar to the last.  One would think that you would stop for a second and say, `Wait a minute! This feels similar.`, but, we never do, do we? We merely carry on, having parallel relationships all of our lives.  Almost like we were given an imprint at birth and that is what we would follow, until we finally got it right.  Benton, she thinks, is that `got it right` person.  The one who untangled the misunderstandings, inconsistencies, and insensitivities of the past, the one who ties the strings together, makes things right, and never, ever gives up.  He can be an ass.  No doubt about that one.  But he is also her hero, too.  She would not have come nearly as far with her goals without him.

            Before Benton, there was Trudy, short for Theresa.  Yes, strange nickname, but interestingly, it matches her persona. She did always tell the truth.  Pamela could trust her, but she turned out to be someone she just could not rely upon.  A train wreck they would say.  Her life was a bomb site, the crater left after an asteroid hit, the derailed train car hovering off of the side of a lurching suspension bridge.  Every day, some thing new, but not in a good way with Trudy.  Never in a good way.  Any phone call coming from her end was sure to result in a visit to the hospital, the funeral home, or the jail in order to bring bail money and/or a change of clothes. And sometimes, these would be her only clothes.

            They arrive at 744 Lincoln Blvd., a monstrous art deco skyscraper with 6 elevators and 130 floors.  On the 128^th, the offices of CCM Productions begin, with the more senior executives as you approach the top.  They pass the doorman who tips his red hat with fingers like sausages, quickly hiding his magazine as we drift swiftly by.  Pamela was always nervous as she entered these elevators. She adjusts her stockings and skirt and holds her chin higher.  Benton patiently waits, resting on his elegance, at the elevator keypad.  He glances her way, looking cool and confident, removing his sunglasses. He turns and gives her a light hug.  `You look worried, my dear. Let me handle it, and we will be fine.` She thinks to herself, `Yes, I could do that, but I won`t this time, not matter how easy it sounds. I must maintain control. Things will change from this moment forward.` She checks her reflection in one of the mirrors along the wall: red hair, thick and brushed to a sheen, rose lipstick still intact and creamy, cleavage is visible, yet not too daring,  expression is….well, doable for now. She is hoping it will change as she reaches that crucial moment.  She steels her backbone, hoping that strengthening herself physically will, in turn, strengthen her resolve.

            And they wait.  The secretary in her tight expensive sweater, mohair perhaps, icily tells them that Mr. Covington, the man himself, is held up at a meeting. Mr. Covington is an imposing man.  Mid 50`s, medium height and build, balding, but not well.  It is his demeanor that gives one the creeps.  Almost `dirty old man` in a way, but with a thick wallet, so weirdly, it gives that stereotype a positive twist.  Being a woman in this particular situation is hard, very hard. She continues to meditate on evoking power and authority, all the while, reserving her femininity as a back up tool in case she may need it.

            She somehow, in that tense waiting room scene looking down at her shoes, was brought back to the Chinese lady on the street today.  Her hot dog cart was her dream.  If she sold some hot dogs, she was content.  If she sold even more the next day, she was even happier and more satisfied. All the while, she did it all alone.  Utterly self reliant, she braved the cold of winter and the heat of summer; her own backbone, strong and resilient.  What makes her different than me?  Who is this man, Mr. Covington? He could be just another hungry guy buying hot dogs.  For some reason , this thought gave her a sudden rush of courage and determination.  Just think of him as just another hungry human being looking for his own level of contentment.  Just like the doorman and his magazine, just like Benton and his feathers.  Even poor, troubled Trudy, and her lack of clothes.  We all face these moments in our lives in our own way.  Tension, expectation, fear, apprehension come over all of us.  We are all just puzzle pieces in the big panorama of life.  We have our roles, our own engagement with others.  We are all necessary in the larger scheme of things. Her mind raced, as she sat there in the charcoal grey office chair, next to the potted orchid, the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and the picture of a seaside cottage on the wall.  This moment is not unique to her, but it is still hers.  It represents a continuum.  If she plays her role well, the continuum remains static and flowing.  She must do her best.  She must stay with the flow.

            The girl in dusty plum mohair rises up to open one of the double doors leading to her future.  Pamela and Benton rise, Benton allowing her to enter first.  The vast red space ahead, filled with curtains and bottles and woodwork and glass, collapses and expands, welcomes and prohibits, coddles and caresses, fondles and ignores, as she enters, her high heels grazing the carpet carefully.  And there he is. Head held erect, she greets the hungry man with a firm hand shake and a strong female glance. His eyes falter a bit, and she notices that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Covington is in need of a sandwich. 

           

I am starting on a new project, and this will be quite the challenge for me.  Valentine`s Day is coming up, and I am intent on writing a love poem.  Granted, I write love poetry all the time, so not such a big deal it would seem.  Only one problem: my poetry is usually dark, deep, and sad.  I want to write a hopeful love poem.  In other words, one that is bright, joyful, possibly borderline ecstatic.  This will be for a friend, so it is important that I keep to these parameters. Anyway, wish me luck.  I really think I am going to need it (and it is a very good thing I have a deadline).

An Experiment on for Size

I draped my tie loosely over the back of the chair after a long day of performing for an audience.  Only, this time, the audience does not know that they are watching me.  Are they watching intently without knowing? Are we all just watching intently without knowing?

            I see myself as creating desire with every movement I make: when those who watch, subsequently will then wish. This then leads to desire.  When I perform, I create something from nothing.

            I slip on my bra, finally after a long day of being saggy and limp; breasts pressed against my chest like a crushed loaf of processed bread.  I slip my nightgown on, let my hair out of the intricate hairstyle I have created to mimic a sort of `metro-sexual` male, the only male whom I could in fact mimic convincingly. I am tall 5 foot 9 inches, so that helps, and my hips are on the narrow side, allowing me to be admired for my apparently masculine litheness.    

            Let me begin from square one.  I am a woman, born a women, and very happy to `be` a woman.  I am trying on an experiment for size.  I wish to `be` a man.  To feel what it is like, to understand through the eyes of others how a man is perceived, a man feels among others, and how a man copes with these perceptions.  It is not only an experiment of experience; it is an experiment to prove a theory:  that we are shaped by perception, by our mirroring out in society, not so much by whom we are inside.  

            I have been an actor for 22 years, more in fact if you count the years that I dreamed of working as one, and even more if you count that fact that I am an actor and was born as one.   I live for my career and do not mind sacrificing myself in order to embrace another character.  In fact, I revel in it:  the ability to feel how others feel, to enter their psyche, to feel their pain and pleasure. 

            My experiment has just begun.  I have convinced everyone, No one has given me a sideways glance at all. They have all treated me with respect and manly acknowledgement.  It is different.  It is more of a solid treatment, therefore less soft, less warm.  Do I miss the warmth?  Sometimes.  I am now moving on to the next step.  To attempt to seduce a woman, or at the very least, connect with one as a man. To understand the difficulty in walking the line between masculine strength and power and that ever-elusive union between two people without gender.  I want to hold masculinity in the palm of my hand, feel its texture, but then drop it in an instant.

             As I hurry to leave the next morning, pulling another tie off the rack and swiftly looping and tying it carefully, I notice one thing a little off with myself today.  I am feeling weak.  I have lost that initial feeling of aggression that was so exhilarating at the start of my experiment. I feel reluctant to begin another day again, but quickly collect myself and my things to exit the haven of my apartment.

My shoes feel snug and a bit too clunky as I march down the hall to the elevator.  My limbs feel heavy because of it.  I pull my shoulders up strong and ready to face that sea of faces in the city below.   I must remember that this newfound persona of mine should not be so conscious.  If I am to live as a man, I must feel comfortable within my own skin and not think about the fact that I am only playing a role. I must rid myself of the awareness that I am feeling.  As an actor, this is the ultimate challenge: to just drink in another life.

 I plunge forward into my day, one life consumed in order to fuel me.

 

 

 

The Sun is Not There: A Sound Experiment

I ask this of you right now

Maybe the sun is not there for the peddlers

The jacks of tirades

The artisans of peppers

The conveyors of words?

 

Hope breached by the almighty nothing

The stupendous lie

He who is bidden could be mistaken

By his biding for time

In fact he is bitten by the firm jab of fear’s metal blade

 

The bite of rust nicks supple flesh

Fast he is wrested away by the nape

Only to be jarred into coherence by the nigh   

All wrong is everything

And everything is awry.

 

The sullenness of sighs

The rhetorical Why

This mere dust among loneliness

The rafters and riddles of cries of surprise.

 

I Dream of Houses

I dream of houses.  Whenever I remember a dream, it is almost always about a house, or sometimes snakes or rats, but that is a different story altogether.  A recent dream of mine including a house, but this one was filled with all sorts of people milling around.  This house served as a container of many things: life, love, memories, change, nostalgia, hospitality, the old guard and tradition, as well as the new and the progressive.  This particular archetypal house stirred me to understand the meaning of the house, not only as structure, but as an archetype of the mind and of humanity.

          I will describe this dream.  Most of the time, when I dream of a house, there will always be some sort of haunted room that I am both avoiding, but, at the same time, drawn to and fascinated by.  This house was different.  There was no haunted room.  I searched and searched, but could not find that thickness in the air, the feeling of a presence or a pull or heavy gesture all around.  The house was completely empty of prior deathly existence.  There was a different figure to replace the inevitable ghost. Instead of an apparition, there was the physical reality of the previous owner.  She, a woman of about 80 years of age wearing an old house dress and slippers, was still wandering the house like a ghost, where it was clear that my husband and I had just taken ownership of it.  While I was struggling to discard all of the trash and old catalogs littering the house, she was frantically trying to prevent this by collecting what she saw as sentimental tokens of her life and love that this house was imbued with into discrete piles, neatly separated from the real trash (well, `real` trash to her).  I was meanwhile collecting in a dark trash bag old home design catalogs from the late sixties that were mirroring the design of the renovated kitchen, circa 1969.  The pictures were the same as what I was seeing all around me (I was organizing a baker`s rack filled with papers in the kitchen), but the wear and tear of time was evident to me, and I could almost feel the age of the surfaces and masses around me.  To the lady, the objects represented her lived life and her loved ones, her kitchen, her care and concern for those who crossed her threshold, the food she cooked, fuel for the other lives she had touched through the years, while to me, they represented the past that must be discarded and replaced in order to make way for a new life, a new way of living, a better world, the beginning of the future of my family and our own ancestral line. 

It was not only the objects I was discarding, however.  With chisel in hand, I began to literally destroy and discard the kitchen itself.  With every blow of the hammer, the walls and tiles of the kitchen crumbled.  I remember feeling empowered, my strength increasing with each strike at the mortar.  As I continued, something emerged beneath the dust of my destruction:  it was the old original kitchen made new again.  The white subway tiles gleamed in the light, even the room began to get brighter as I worked.  There was no sign of wear and tear in this new kitchen.  It was the essence of the house finally revealed after years of being pulled into the house`s subconscious.  The woman who had been pacing behind me, back and forth, disappeared as the dust settled.  Without a trace of her physicality or essence, the room was made new again.  The old kitchen was completely gone (no dumpster needed), and the sun`s rays were streaming into the room through the line of windows along the driveway side of the house.  My husband, my mom, my son (my own ancestral line), and many others were there as this transformation occurred.  I had been brewing some coffee for everyone: the first creation to be made within the new walls of this house.  The coffee was too weak though, even too weak for my mom`s mild taste buds. 

I somehow knew that it would take time before I was able to replace the life that had been there before.  The coffee would get stronger, my own magazines will start to fill the shelves with the year 2013 printed upon them, I would fill those cupboards with my own china, the refrigerator with my own culinary creations. I believe that the lady had left because she understood that life renews and moves on.  We are all part of life in our own time, we each take a piece of the timeline to do what we will, and the house will be our vessel, our time machine that will enable us to hold onto those very artifacts that make our lives sacred.  Houses, therefore, have become our sacred vessels.  And truly, houses are one of my own truly sacred objects. This is the reason why I feel it my duty to honor the essence of houses, to reveal their inner honest beauty instead of the falseness of pretense. I see houses as mirrors of our bodies.  As our bodies serve as vessel through our journey through our lives, so houses are the vessels that contain the body and all of what is truly sacred in the lives that we choose to lead.

 

 

Season`s Greetings: a poem for the winter season.

Season`s Greetings by Susan E. Harris-Gamard

As the earthy night stretches deep and black

And the clangy sound of engines and brakes

Is silenced under the frozen muffle

Of crystalline randomness,

Billions of lost souls are deposited onto a wasteland,

Without warning

Or imprint.

They just fall.

Huddled together like angels evicted from paradise.

As I rise, my own body anew

In the diurnal sunrise.

I am mirrored on the outside

By presences

Themselves asleep

As I had been.

The prodigal winter raged and gained strength

Regardless

Of who was watching.

I walk out the door to find that the ground

That I knew yesterday

Was made anew, covered with tiny virgins

Purified and caressed by the night and moon`s full light.

A sole set of tracks has vanquished the smooth landscape

Intruder, caught by its own traces.

Like a detective I search for intent

Caution Do Not Cross

The Boundary for fear

Of contaminating the scene

That remains.

I walk forward to mindlessly tread
Onto the horizontal plane of the perfect glittering surface

With my own boot prints

(Held within a database somewhere

Black Sorels Size 8)

Charged with only negligence

And so I deposit my own little angel

Onto the large yellow vehicle

Directed towards his own enlightenment

At the small school

Nestled within the hill.

Hands of Clay

Hands of Clay

Labyrinthine hollows swirling freely through unformed clay

Slithering, slipping , moving down

And tossed away.

Tunneling blindly through the darkness

Searching for that perfect state

Hands against the warm fluid

Disappearing, releasing fate.

Water, an intermediary between this organic bond

This terra incognita slowly folding into a tight mound

I am the alchemist of my own single vision of today

Like an injured pigeon, hands cup clay.

Night comes, the wheel is placed away

Covered neatly to sleep

As your own body`s quiet firmness

Moves against my own vulnerable, moldable form

The complex folds of your languid eyelids relax and drift down

Tears overthrown, shaken away by loving breath, 

blowing warm.

I am quickly reminded that we are but two wholes becoming one

Not like the clay nestled in a potter`s hands

But like the ocean, two rivers 

flowing away from the land.